VOLUME 4 | NUMBER 1

FEBRUARY 2017

Volume 4 Number 1 | February 2017

Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy (CONTEND)

and

Commission on Concern 11: Rights of Teachers, Researchers

and Other Education Personnel, International League of Peoples Struggles (ILPS)

PINGKIAN
Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-imperialist Education
Volume x Number x
ISSN-2244-3142

Copyright 201x CONTEND and ILPS

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for brief
quotations for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review,
without permission of the publisher.
Editors
Gonzalo Campoamor II (University of the Philippines)
Peter Chua (San Jose State University, USA)
Gerry Lanuza (University of the Philippines)
Roland Tolentino (University of the Philippines)
Cover Design
Manolo Sicat
Layout
Tilde Acua

International Advisory Board

Delia Aguilar (University of Connecticut)
Joi Barrios (University of California, Berkely)
Jonathan Beller (Pratt Institute)
Ramon Guillermo (University of the Philippines, Diliman)
Caroline Hau (Kyoto University)
Bienvenido Lumbera (University of the Philippines, Diliman)
Elmer Ordonez
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez (University of California, Davis)
Epifanio San Juan, Jr. (University of Texas, Austin)
Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College)
Judy Taguiwalo (University of the Philippines, Diliman)
Ed Villegas (University of the Philippines, Manila)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY SECTION

Ang Neoliberal na Opensiba ng APEC

at Epekto Nito sa Edukasyong Pilipino

Jose Ma. Sison

The Parallax View of Alienation and Anomie through the Monetization

of Education: Interview on Teachers Day using Young Karl Marx,

Emile Durkheim, George Simmel

Jasmin Ado, Bernard Santos, Moises P. Jusoy, Marc Del Christian P. Reyes

NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC SCHOLARSHIP

Nation/state, Nationalism, and Global Violence

E. San Juan, Jr.
On the Imperialist Cultural Offensive
J. de Lima
Philosophy of the masses: The contemporary role
of philosophy in the Philippines
Regletto Aldrich Imbong

A Critique of the Proposed Amendments

in the Philippine Constitution
Edberto M. Villegas
In the Defence of the Actuality of Communism:
Why you shouldnt be afraid of it
Jasmine Ado
Neo-liberal na Atake sa Mundo ng Paggawa at Panunupil
sa Karapatan ng Manggagawa: Hamon at Paglaban
Gerry Lanuza

LITERARY FOLIO

Analekta at iba pang tula

E. San Juan, Jr.

19

33
57
67
79
89
97

105

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

INDIGENOUS EDUCATION UNDER SIEGE

The year 2015 will be remembered in Philippine history as the bloodiest year
for the Lumad schools in Mindanao, Philippines. In August 2015, a 14-year-old Manobo
girl from Talaingod filed rape charges against 3 soldiers. The military confirmed
that the suspects were soldiers, but explained that the charges were dropped after
they paid P63,000 to the family (http://www.rappler.com/nation/105847-timelineattacks-lumad-mindanao, June 1, 2016). A month later, at least 10 houses and a Lumad
school were burned by the Magahat-Bagani paramilitary group in the community
in Panocmo-an in Diatagon, Lianga, Surigao de Sur. The group also burned a corn
sheller owned by the community in Kabulohan. Both communities are not far from
the site where Samarca, Campos, and Sinzo were killed.
In response to the growing clamor from deiffrent sectors, the Department
of Education Region XI declared that the schools were not closed but just not
reopened. The military and DepEd announced that the schools would be replaced
by the military using para-teachers or soldiers who will act as teachers.
This kind of terroristic assault against the indigenous schools is best described
by Kalumaran Secretary General Dulphing Ogan: It is a form of ethnocide but it is
worse because there are specific characteristics of impunity and killings targeting
the Lumad. What is alarming is that it is happening all over Mindanao.
In the face of this horrendous state terrorism, progressive teachers and
educational workers stood with the Lumad to condemn the terrorism unleashed
by the military. The progressive teachers of University of the Philippines with
their Chancellor stood to defend the rights of the Lumad to education and selfdetermination by hosting the camp out of the Lumad from Mindanao.
But the problem of indigenous people and their rights to education and
self-determination is deeply rooted in the kind of economic policies that define the
communities where they stay. Under the neoliberal economic reforms, under the
behest of neoliberal globalization and imperialist plunder, indigenous communities
are subjected to local and global violence. This violence penetrates the spaces once
exclusively controlled by the indigenous communities by the tentacles of global
capital through mining concessions, illegal logging, and resource-plundering business
ventures.
Hence any resistance against state-sponsored terrorism against indigenous
communities cannot be successful unless it is situated within the larger frame of
peoples resistance, global, local and national, against imperialist plunder of resources
of developing countries.
In this issue of Pingkian, the authors and their articles address the problems
of education in the era of intensifying imperialist attack against education and
indigenous peoples. Jose Maria Sisons article on education and Asia Pacific
Cooperation highlights the role of regional imperialist blocs in monopolizing and
policing, not only the trade within the Asia Pacific region, but also the exchange and
commodification of educational goods.


The article of Jasmin Ado, Bernard Santos, Moises P. Jusoy, Marc Del Christian
P. Reyes addresses the problems of teachers organizing and unions in celebration of
World Teachers Day. These two articles emphasize and magnify the role of critical
pedagogy in the age of neoliberal reform of higher education.
Other articles advance the national democratic critique. The article of Sony
San Juan addresses the problem of global violence and how it is entangled with the
problem of imperialist intervention and plunder.
De Limas masterful analysis of cultural imperialism locates the violence of
imperialism within the symbolic world of cultural reproduction.
The articles of Jasmin Ado and Jerry Imbong highlight the role of philosophy
in class struggle. Both the articles of Ado and Imbong follow Althusserian definition
of philosophy: class struggle in thought.
Finally the article of Edberto Villegas on the political economy of the current
clamor to change and amend the Constitutional provides the backdrop for any
analysis of educational reforms that the future may hold.
As part of Pingkian, the Editors also included section on literary works that
reflect the revolutionary spirit of art and literature.
The Editors are hoping that these articles. Literary pieces, and the documents
included in this issue of Pingkian will be useful tools and references for all educational
workers who want to understand better the violence of the world we live today.
The Editors!

CRITICAL
PEDAGOGY
SECTION

Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

Ang Neoliberal
Na Opensiba Ng Apec
At Epekto Nito Sa
Edukasyong Pilipino
Jose Ma. Sison
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

Ang Neoliberal Na Opensiba Ng Apec At Epekto

Nito Sa Edukasyong Pilipino
Jose Maria Sison
Mga kapanalig at kababayan, Pilipinas ang nagpupunong abala ngayong taon sa Asia
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), hila ang may mga sandaang pulong na ugnay
sa APEC marami sa mga lunsod ng Pilipinas tulad ng Manila, Cebu, Iloilo, Tagaytay
at Clark Freeport at rururok sa taunang Economic Leaders Meeting ng APEC na
idaraos sa Manila sa Nobyembre.

Nagsisimula nang daklutin ang pansin ng midya sa pagtatambol sa APEC
sa panahong inuuga ang sambayanang Pilipino sa dagok ng malubhang krisis at
panibagong mga opensiba ng global na kapitalismo sa rehimen ng patakarang
neoliberal. Sa partikular, nadarama ng kabataang Pilipino ang tindi ng krisis na
umaapekto sa pambansang ekonomya at sistema ng edukasyon.
Pinasusuray ang masang mag-aaral at mga pamilya nila sa dagok ng pataas na
presyo ng mga bilihin at pabulok na kalidad ng edukasyon, gayundin ng malubhang
kawalang hanapbuhay na nakaumang sa kanila kapag naghanap ng trabaho. Kaya
matalas ang interes nilang arukin kung paano talaga pinalalala ang mga suliraning
ito ng itinatatwang mga reporma sa mga patakaran sa ekonomya at edukasyon ng
Pilipinas, na tuwirang nakakawing sa mga opensibang neoliberal at APEC.
I. APEC bilang instrumento ng opensibang neoliberal laban
sa mamamayan ng daigdig

Ipinangangalandakan ng APEC na itinataguyod nito ang kooperasyong ekonomiko

sa hanay ng mga bayan ng malawak na rehiyong Asya-Pasipika. Tahanan nga ang 21
myembrong-estado nito ng tatlong bilyong mamamayan na bumubuo ng 60 porsyento
ng daigdigang ekonomya, at sa gayon sa luklukan ng napakalaking kolektibong
potensyal para sa kaunlarang sosyo-ekonomiko at entre-estadong kooperasyon.
Gayunman, ipinapakita ng rekord ng APEC mula sa pagkatatag nito noong
1989 na pangunahing isinusulong ng oryentasyong malaking negosyo, adyendang
neoliberal, at mga mayor na direksyong pampatakaran ay ang pagpapasulong
pangunahin sa dominanteng mga interes ng mauunlad na bayan sa pangunguna ng
United States at Hapon. Kasang-ayon sa pasimunong-US na Bretton Woods Agreement
at Washington Consensus, agresibong itinulak ng APEC sa higit sa kalahati ng mundo
ang mga susing sangkap ng globalisasyong neoliberalliberalisasyon ng kalakalan at
pamumuhunan, deregulasyon, pribatisasyon at denasyunalisasyon.
Sa katunayan, idinaos ng US ang 1st Economic Leaders Meeting (ELM) ng
APEC noong 1993 para itulak paigpaw ang nabalahong WTO Uruguay Round at
tangkaing pirapirasuhin ang pagtutol ng mga bayang dimaunlad. Agad itong sinundan
ng tinawag na Bogor Goals na pinagtibay ng 2nd ELM noong 1994 na malinaw na


nakatuon sa pagtatatag ng liberalisasyon sa kalakalan at pamumuhunan sa rehiyon

para sa bayang mauunlad pag-abot sa 2010 at sa bayang di mauunlad sa 2020.
Mula noon, nagsilbi na ang APEC bilang plataporma upang ikoordina ang
mga interes ng mga bayang maunlad, buuin ang consensus (kapag hindi lubusang
malutas ang mga alitan) sa hanay nila laluna sa malayang kalakalan, pamumuhunan at
pinansya, at akitin pang lalo ang mga bayang di maunlad sa bitag ng neoliberalismo.
Bilang isang orihinal na kasapi, parating ginagamit ng US, ang kanyang impluwensya
para apihin at itulak ang ibang mga -bayang kasapi tungo sa pangangayupapa at sa
gayoy mapanatili ang pangkalahatang dominansya.
Paimbabaw na nagbubuo raw ang APEC ng consensus na kunway boluntaryo
at walang obligasyon sa hanay ng mga kinatawan ng mga gobyerno sa pamamagitan
ng mga taunang pulong. Gayunman lingid na kumikilos ang APEC Business Advisory
Council at CEO Summit bilang daluyan ng makapangyarihang lobby ng mga
korporasyon.
Katuwang sila ng ibat ibang komite ng APEC gaya ng Committee on Trade and
Investment, na tauhang malalaking burukrata, teknokrata, at hirng na mga kawani
ng mga korporasyon. Ang gilingang propaganda ng APEC ay tuluy-tuloy na naglalabas
ng pananaliksik sa patakaran at detalyadong mga alituntunin at rekomendasyon na
kumakatawan sa consensus sa hanay ng naghaharing uri sa pulitika at ekonomya na
Asia-Pacific, na tinatatakan na lamang ng basbas ng taunang ELM.
Ang tema ng APEC ngayong taon, Pagbubuo ng Mapanaklaw na mga Ekonomya,
Pagbubuo ng Mas Mabuting Daigdig (Building Inclusive Economies, Building a Better
World), ay umuulit lamang sa mapanlinlang na mantrang lampas-2008 na Adyenda
sa Reporma ng Mapanaklaw na Paglaki (Reform Agenda for Inclusive Growth)
ng World Bank, na ginaya din ng Asian Development Bank. Gayunman, sa likod ng
gayong kasuyasuyang-tamis mga islogan tulad ng pagdemokratisa ng bunga ng
paglago ng ekonomya (democratizing the fruits of economic growth), pagtataguyod
ng paglahok ng SME sa mga pamilihang global, pamumuhunan sa tao (investing in
human capital), at pagbubuo ng matitibay na mga komunidad (building resilient
communities), ang nasa tuktok ng mga bagay sa agenda ng APEC 2015 sa integrasyon
ng ekonomya ng rehiyon (REI o regional economic integration) ay patuloy pa ring
umiikot sa balangkas na neoliberal.
Kabilang sa priyoridad na ganitong mga bagay ang pagsusulong ng mga
panukala tungo sa Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP); ang Estratehikong
Blueprint para itaguyod ang Global Value Chains (Strategic Blueprint for Promoting
Global Value Chains) na kumakatawan sa buod ng integrasyong ekonomiko; ang
Kasunduan sa Makabagong Kaunlaran, Repormang Ekonomiko at Paglago o Accord
on Innovative Development, Economic Reform and Growth na kumakatawan sa
malawak na repormang istruktural, at mga pagbabago; at ang Connectivity
Blueprint para sa 2015-2025 na naglalayong tiyakin ang walang-patlang na daloy
ng tao, impormasyon, at kalakalan (laluna sa mga serbisyo) sa buong rehiyon sa
kapakinabangan ng monopolyong kapitalismo na pinangungunahan ng US.
Ipinapanukala ng APEC ang FTAAP, na unang nagkathang-isip noong 2006 at
higit na sinaliksik noong 2010, bilang isang komprehensibo at nagtataling kasunduan


sa susunod na henerasyon ng mga isyu sa kalakalan at pamumuhunan na susuporta

sa WTO at magsusulong sa layunin ng REI. Sa tinawag na Beijing Roadmap ng APEC na
binalangkas noong 2014, pormal kuno ang magiging negosasyon sa FTAAP sa labas
ng APEC pero susuportahan ng mga proseso ng APEC sa pagbubuo ng consensus.
Sa ngayon , dalawang mayor na landas tungong FTAAP ang ipinapanukala: ang
pinangungunahan ng US na Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), na nangangailangan ng
mataas na antas ng integrasyon sa rehiyon at kinapapalooban ng maraming bayan sa
Asya-Pasipiko pero liban sa Tsina; at ang RCEP o Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership na nakabase sa ASEAN at mas maluwag na anyo ng integrasyon at
kinabibilangan ng Tsina pero hindi ng US.
Nagkakarera ang TPP at RCEP para mapili ng APEC bilang pangunahing padron
ng FTAAP. Pero nananatiling posibleng pagtibayin ng APEC ang pinaghalong FTAAP
na bahagiy TPP at bahagiy RCEP, at sa gayoy magiging balangkas sa kooperasyon
at kompetisyong US-Tsina sa dakong ito ng mundo. May mga pagsisikap para gawing
myembro din ng FTAAP ang lahat ng bayan sa APEC, at mga mungkahing palawakin
pa ang kasapian ng APEC, upang lalong maging masaklaw ang FTAAP.
Sa gayon, mahalagang arena ang APEC kapwa ng patuloy na sabwatan at ng
patinding alitan ng dalawang kapangyarihang imperyalista, ang US at ang Tsina, sa
kapinsalaan ng mas mahihina at mas maliliit na bayan. Patuloy na tinatamasa ng
blokeng pinangungunahan ng US (kabilang ang Hapon, Canada at Australia) ang
pamamayagpag sa buong mundo at determinado itong kompletuhin ang usapang
TPP at ang US pivot (pagbaling) sa East Asia. Sa kabilang banda, pinalalakas ng Tsina
ang sariling posisyon sa pagsisimento ng mas malapit na ugnayan sa pulitika at
ekonomya ng Russia, India at ibang mga estado sa South at Central Asia sa loob ng
lumalawak na Shanghai Cooperation Organization, at sa global sa pamamagitan ng
bagong lunsad na BRICS Development Bank.
Sa kabila ng sariling panloob na mga suliranin, patuloy na pinapalawak ng
Tsina ang impluwensya nito sa loob at nang lampas sa rehiyon sa pagtatayo ng
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) kasama ang 49 na ibang bayan sa AsiaPacific, Europe, Africa at Latin America. Kapag lubusan na itong naitayo sa huling
bahagi ng 2015, maaaring maging karibal o katambal ng AIIB ang IMF bilang bagong
kasangkapang imperyalista na magagamit ng Tsina na paandarin ang mga rekurso
para sa sariling ambisyong ehemoniko at para idikta ang mga tuntunin ng entrerehiyonal na integrasyon at konektibidad, laluna sa pamamagitan ng engrandeng
proyekto nitong Silk Road.
Maging alinmang bersyon, TPP na pinangungunahan ng US o kaya RCEP na
pabor sa Tsina, ang magdomina sa proseso, at bago pa marating ang pinal na kasunduan
sa FTAAP, inilulugar na ng APEC ang mga blokeng pambuo ng integrasyong ekonomiko
sa rehiyon sa magkakasunod na taon. Samantalang hindi kuno nagtatali ang mga
dokumentong ibinubuga nito, ipinatutupad na ang nilalaman ng mga ito ng mga
myembrong-estado at malaking negosyo ayon sa estilong sumunod-sa-namumuno .
Sa esensya, ipinupuslit ang TPP sa medyo binagong porma. Ang resultay isang ganap
na kaayusan na mas lubusang nagliliberalisa sa kalakalan at pamumuhunan, sumisira
sa natitirang bakas ng proteksyong pambansa, at nagbubukas sa mga rekursong


tao, kapital at likas ng dimaunlad na mga bayan at mamamayan sa Asya-Pasipiko sa

pagsasamantala ng US at ibang dominanteng kapitalistang mga kapangyarihan.
Sakay sa islogang Namumuhunan sa Pagpapaunlad ng Kapital na Tao
(Investing in Human Capital Development), itinutulak ng APEC ang mga sistema ng
higit na integradong sistemang edukasyonal at skills-training na nagdidiin sa agham
at teknolohiya, pag-enroll sa ibat ibang bansa, sa papel ng ICT o information and
communications technology, at pinahusay na kooperasyon ng mga tagapagbigay ng
edukasyon at mga tagapag-empleyo.
Sakay sa islogang Building Sustainable and Resilient Communities, ginagamit ng
APEC ang umanoy mga adhikaing pleksibilidad, sustenebilidad at seguridad sa
pagkain para bigyang-katwiran ang mas mahigpit na integrasyon at pag-uugnay ng
mga ekonomyang Asia-Pacific. Itinutulak nito ang higit na paghihigpit sa ugnayan
ng global na produksyon at suplay na kontrolado ng TNC, ang konektibidad
ng imprastuktura na itinutulak ng mga korporasyon, at ibang mga pakanang
kooperasyon sa rehiyon. Ginagamit ang seguridad sa pagkain at pag-angkop sa
klima upang bigyang-katwiran ang korporadong kontrol sa mga rekursong dagat at
kostal sa pamamagitan ng tinaguriang mga inisyatibang Green Economy at Blue
Economy.
Sakay sa islogang Nagtataguyod ng Paglahok ng SME sa mga Pamilihan ng
Rehiyon at Daigdig, nilalayon ng APEC na higit na mabitag ang SME sa REI at FTAAP
na mga pakanang imperyalista, gawing sweatshop ang pinakamatagumpay na mga
empresa na pagluluwas ang oryentasyon pero dependyente sa angkat na bagay
na kontrolado ng mga TNC (bilang mga sangkap ng umanoy global value chain, at
isabotahe ang independyenteng pambansang industriyalisasyon).
II. Ang neoliberal na opensiba sa edukasyon

Kabilang sa adyenda ng APEC sa ekonomya ang neoliberal na pakanang

repormahin ang sistema ng edukasyon ng mga myembrong-bansa, nang sa gayoy
mas mahusay na nakapila ang mga ito sa pagsuplay ng pangangailangan sa bihasang
paggawa, mga propesyunal, syentipiko at mga pangangailangang ideolohiyal-kultural
ng global na sistemang kapitalista at ng mga panginoon nitong imperyalista.
Ang dekadang Edukasyon para sa Lahat (Education for All o EFA) na inilunsad
noong 1990 at inulit sa Dakar Framework of Action sa World Education Forum noong
2000 ay mabilis na naagaw (hijack) ng World Bank (WB) at ibang mga ahensya ng
UN. Mula noon ipinapatupad na ng mga bansang maunlad ang repormang neoliberal
sa sariling mga paaralan at itinutulak nila ang pagpapatupad nito sa buong mundo.
Masyadong lubog ang Dakar Framework sa neoliberalismo at superpisyalidad ng UN
kaya pinupuna ito maging ng mga internasyunal na NGO gaya ng Oxfam, Action Aid,
at Education International.
Sa likod ng patsada ng EFA, limitado ang komitment ng UN sa Millennium
Development Goal (MDG) Target 2A na nagsasaad na sa 2015, makukumpleto ng
lahat ng bata saanman, lalaki man o babae, na ang buong kurso ng primaryang pagaaral. Ang target na ito na ni hindi tumutugon sa kalidad ng edukasyon at hindi
10

sumasaklaw sa segundaryong paaralan ay hindi pa natatamo. Mga 58 milyong mga

bata sa edad pamprimaryang paaralan (9%), 63 milyong kabataan naman sa edad
pansegundaryong paaralan (17%) ang mga wala sa paaralan. Maaaring bumaba na
hanggang 2006 mula 1996 ang mga tantos ng hindi nag-aaral, pero pumatag na ang
mga ito mula 2007 pasulong. Sinabi ng naalarmang UNICEF na, sa kasalukuyang mga
tantos, kailangan pa ang 200 taon para matamo ang MDG Target 2A.
Sa halip na tiyakin ang unibersal na batayang edukasyon, nakatuon ang
neoliberal na reporma sa paaralan sa korporatisasyon ng mas mataas na edukasyon, at
sa pagbabaling ng mga paaralang primarya at segundaryo sa pagsusuplay ng bihasang
paggawa sa pangangailangan ng kapitalismong global. Sinasabi nito na unibersal na
karapatan ang edukasyon pero hindi ito nakatuon sa edukasyon bilang serbisyong
panlipunan kundi bilang kalakal. Matagal nang isang mekanismong pang-angkop
para sa mahihirap na bansa ang komersyalisadong edukasyon, gayunmay malayong
mas pinasahol ng neoliberal na mga repormang pampaaralan ang komersyalisasyon
ng edukasyon.
Nirebisa na ang mga kurikulum, ang mga paraan ng at materyales sa
pagtuturo, at ang mga sistema sa paggrado at pagsubok para lalong bumagay sa mga
pangangailangan ng malaking negosyo at ng global na mga kawing sa produksyon.
Pinagpapaligsahan ang mga estudyante para sa matataas na grado at marka sa
mga pagsusulit, nang sa gayoy maibenta nila ang sarili sa mas mataas na presyo sa
pamilihan ng bihasang paggawa. Pinagpapaligsahan din ang mga paaralan at guro, sa
global na mga pamantayang akademiko at ranggo ang nasa isip, para maibenta ang
sarili at ang mga serbisyo nila sa mas matataas na presyo.
Madalas ipresenta ang globalisasyong akademiko sa nagningning na mga
pananalita. Higit daw ang mga oportunidad para sa lokal na mga pamantasan
na makikompitensya sa pagraranggong global, tumanggap ng mas maraming
estudyanteng internasyunal, magpadala ng mga pinakamagaling na gradweyt sa
North America, Europa, Hapon, at ibang lugar, at maki-partner sa mga unibersidad at
TNC na sikat sa buong mundo. Gayunmay ilan lamang sa kanila ang nagtatagumpay.
Nananatiling mga diploma mill ang bulto ng mga paaralang maramihang nagluluwal
ng bihasang pwersa ng paggawa at ordinaryong propesyunal.
Tumungo ang neoliberal na mga reporma sa paaralan sa bawas na gugulin
ng gobyerno sa edukasyong publiko at sa dagdag na pribatisasyon. Tumitindi ang
operasyon ng mga pamantasang estado, mga kolehiyo at ibang mga paaralang
publiko, at maging ng mga pribadong paaralang umanoy non-profit, bilang
napagkakakitaang mga negosyo, na kadalasay sa pakikipagtuwang sa malaking
negosyo. Nauuwi ito sa pilipit na mga prayoridad na akademiko, mas matataas na
tuition, paglabag sa mga karapatang guro, at pasahol na kawalan ng panlipunang
katarungan.
Para dagdagan ang sariling kakayahan sa kompetisyon at ganansya, nagtutuon
ang mga kolehiyo at unibersidad sa mga programang mas maganansya at tinatapyas
iyong itinuturing na marhinal o kayay hindi kritikal (tulad ng sa humanities).
Ikinukomersyo ang mga lupain nila, gusali, resulta ng mga pananaliksik at ibang
mga rekursong kaalaman. Isinisiksik ang mas maraming kurso sa isang taon at
11

bumabaling sa trimester para mas mabilis ang pagpapagradweyt. Sinasagad nila ang
mga mag-aaral at guro sa pagtataas ng tuition at padadagdag ng pasaning trabaho,
sa pamamagitan ng mas istriktong mga rekisito sa mga ipinagkakaloob (grant) at
ipinauutang (loan), at sa paglimita ng sahod at benepisyo ng mga guro at ng mga
hindi-nagtuturong kawani.
Sa huli, ipinataw mula sa itaas ang lahat ng nabanggit na hakbangin sa
pamamagitan ng mga prosesong burukratiko na lingid na isinasagawa ng mga pulitiko
at ng WB o ng mga consultant na pinupondohan ng mga korporasyon. Samantala,
pinapaliit ang papel ng nagtuturo at di-nagtuturong empleyado, mga magulang at
mag-aaral sa konseptwalisasyon, pagpaplano, at pagpapatupad. Binabanatan ang mga
protestang kampus laban sa gayong mga reporma sa pamamagitan ng propagandang
anti-Kaliwa kung hindi man ng tuwirang pasistang panunupil.
Sa Pilipinas, malinaw na halimbawa ang tinatawag na programang
Kindergarten hanggang Grade 12 (K-12 program)sentrong palamuti sa inisyatiba
ng rehimeng Aquinong isang neoliberal na reporma sa paaralan na pumalpak.
Sa ilalim ng Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 (R.A. 10533), papalitan
ang lumang 10-gradong saligang sistema ng edukasyon (anim sa elementarya at apat
sa mataas na paaralan) ng sistemang 12-grado (may dagdag na dalawang taon sa
abanteng mataas na paaralan) bukod sa rekisitong kindergarten. Sa likod ng pangakit na terminong humahabol (catching up) sa mga pamantayang global, layunin
ng programang K-12 ni Aquino na mapahanay ang sistemang edukasyon ng Pilipinas
sa kapitalistang sistemang global at mas mahusay na makipagkompetisyon sa ibang
dimauunlad na bansa sa pagluluwal ng malaking reserbang suplay ng bihasang
paggawa para sa pamilihan ng mundo (world market) at particular para sa rehiyong
Asya-Pasipiko nang sa gayoy mapanatiling mababa ang sweldo at sahod.
Sumasakay ang programa sa sumusunod na mga argumentong magkakaugnay:
Una, kailangang paluwagin (decong est) ang kasalukuyang sistema dahil
mabigat na matutuhan (hard-pressed to learn) ng mga mag-aaral sa 10 taon ang
natututuhan ng mga estudyante sa ibang mga bansa sa 12 taon. Ikalawa, hindi sapat
na naihahanda ng matataas na paaralan ngayon ang mga mag-aaral para sa kolehiyo.
Ikatlo, masyadong maagang magtapos ang mga mag-aaral ngayon sa edad na 16 sa
mataas na paaralan, kaya mabibigyan sila ng dagdag na dalawang taon ng higit na
oportunidad para magkatrabaho dahil nasa legal na edad na sila at may sapat na
kabihasaan. At ikapat, bahagi ang K-12 ng mga pamantayang global, na kailangan
para mag-aplay sa trabaho o pag-aaral na postgraduate sa ibayong dagat. Inaamin
ng ikalimang argumento na nakahanay ang sistema ng edukasyon ng Pilipinas sa
pinakamatagal sa Southeast Asia at istorikong isa sa pinakamahusay sa buong
mundo, pero nahuhuli na sa mga hinihingi ng mga ekonomyang batay-kaalaman
(knowledge-based economies) ng ika-21 siglo.
Bagsak ang mga argumentong ito kasi kalakhang batay sa maling mga saligan
at huwad na mga pangako ng globalisasyong neoliberal, at sa simplistikong ideya na
dapat sumali na ang mga Pilipino sa global na K-12 dahil lahat ng ibay nakasakay
na rito. Binabalewala ang ibang mga pag-aaral na nagpapakitang walang malinaw
na ugnayan sa pagitan ng kantidad ng oras at kalidad ng proseso para matuto.
12

Binabalewala ang katunayang maraming bansa ang deka-dekada nang naka-K12 pero nananatiling napakaatrasado at mas masahol pa sa Pilipinas kaugnay ng
mga sukatan sa edukasyon. Ni hindi maipaliwanag kung bakit, sa kabila ng hindi
pagdaan sa K-12, kabilang ang mga Pilipino sa pinakamaraming may mas mahusay
na edukasyon at handang tumanggap ng mas mababang bayad at pinakananais na
overseas workers.
Sa totoo, isa ang K-12 ni Aquino sa maraming reporma sa edukasyon na
inuobliga ng ASEAN Integration, ayon sa recomendasyon ng SEAMEO INNOTECH (na
nagpapasimuno at nagpapalaganap ng mga programa sa edukasyon na bago at may
oryentasyon sa teknolohiya) at ng ASEAN Mutual Recognition Arrangement (MRA)
Projects, para hikayatin ang pangingibang bansa ng mga manggagawa pero kasabay
na nagtatakda ng mga pamantayan sa edukasyon at propesyon para sa tawidhangganan (cross-border) na pagtatrabaho sa loob ng rehiyong Southeast Asia.
Napakaespisipikong itinutulak ang K-12 ni Aquino ng Washington Accord
and Europes Bologna Process sa pangunguna ng US, sa layuning kilalanin o bigyan
ng akreditasyon tanging ang mga propesyunal (o inhinyero sa kaso ng Washington
Accord) na dumaan na sa 12 taong batayang edukasyon. Mas pangkalahatang
itinutulak ito ng EFA ng WB at ng Millennium Development Goals (MDG) ng UN.
Sa sistemang K-12, nakatuon sa mataas na paaralan (lalo na sa huling
dalawang taon) ang mga kabihasaang espesyalisado at teknikal na hanap ng global na
pamilihang paggawa. Halimbawa sa umanoy Technology and Livelihood Education
(TLE) para sa Grades 7-10, at Tracks/Specialization para sa Grades 11-12, kasama sa
modyul ang pag-aaral ng gawaing bahay, pagtutubero, welding, pananahi, caregiving,
pagkarpentero, pag-aalaga ng kagandahan at kuko, paggawa ng tinapay, atbp.
Sa halip na dumaan sa komprehensibong batayang edukasyon para ihanda
ang sarili na maging produktibong myembro ng lipunang Pilipino, inaasahan ngayon
ang mayorya ng kabataang Pilipino na maghandang maging kasambahay, caregiver,
tagalinis, waiter, orderly sa hotel, hairstylist, tubero, welder, karpentero at panadero
sa buong mundo.
Sa kabilang banda, inaalisan ng diin ng K-12 at ibang neoliberal na mga reporma sa
paaralan ang patriyotikong edukasyon, kamulatan at kultura. Sa mga pamantasan,
tinapyas na ang mga kurso o paksa na ukol sa kasaysayan ng Pilipinas, lenggwahe at
panitikang Pilipino, pamahalaan at konstitusyong Pilipino. Sa mataas na paaralan,
babawasan na rin ang oras na nakatuon sa Araling Panlipunan, at babaguhin ang
istruktura ng kurikulum para humalaw ng mga tema mula sa US National Council for
Social Studies.
Ang balintunay palulubhain ng K-12 gamot ni Aquino ang karamdaman dahil sa
maling oyentasyon, mahinang plano at kakulangan sa pondo, mga palatandaan na
magiging burara ang implementasyon, at magkakaroon ng maraming negatibong
epekto na pwede sanang maiwasan.
Una, maraming taon nang nananatiling nasa antas na malayong mababa sa
pamantayang takda ng UNESCO (anim na porsyento, 6%, man lamang ng GDP) at
ng WB (20% ng pambansang badyet) ang mga alokasyong badyet ng gobyernong
Pilipino para sa edukasyong publiko. Kahit walang K-12, hinaharap na ng mga
13

paaralang publiko ang napakalubhang kawalan ng mga pasilidad, libro, at mga guro.
Tinatayang aabot ang mga rekisito ng K-12 sa badyet para sa 2014-2019 sa USD 4,410
milyon, at kahit ngayon tanaw na ng gobyerno ang depisit at may negosasyon ito sa
mga bangkong gaya ng ADB para sa USD 100 milyon na pampuno sa kakulangan.
Kaya, sa kabalintunaan ay pasasamain pa ng K-12 ang mga limitasyon at kakapusan
ng rekurso sa badyet para sa mga paaralang publiko, na napakalaki ang epekto sa
kalidad ng edukasyon at sa tantos ng paglahok, bukod sa higit pang ilulubog nito sa
utang ang bansa.
Ikalawa, dahil takdang saligang kakapusan sa badyet anut anumay
kakailanganing balikatin ng mga mag-aaral at mga pamilya nila ang dagdag na
pasaning K-12. Ngayong 2015-2016, 1.4 milyong mga mag-aaral sa ikapat na taon sa
mataas na paaralang publiko at tapos na sana sa lumang sistema ang pipiliting pumili
kung dadaan sila sa dagdag na dalawa pang taon (Gradong 11-12). Kung pipiliing
tanggapin ang dalawang taon pa, kakailanganin ng bawat estudyante ang mga PHP
30,000 (USD 660) na lubhang makakabigat sa badyet ng magulang. Alternatibo na
hindi na magkolehiyo at maghanap sa halip ng trabaho bilang madisbentaheng mga
dropout sa mataas na paaralan ang eksaktong kalagayang iniiwasan sana ng K-12.
Ikatlo, patitindihin ng K-12 ang pribatisasyon ng sistema ng edukasyon. Sa
halos 1.95 milyong mag-aaral sa mga publiko at pribadong paaralan na inaasahang
magtapos ng ikapat na antas (Gradong 10) ngayong taon, mga kalahati lamang
ang tatanggapin ng matataas na paaralang publiko na may Grades 11-12. Walang
pagpipilian ang kalahati pa kundi lumipat sa mga eskwelahang pribado o mga
unibersidad at kolehiyo ng estado na nag-aalok ng Grade 11 (karaniwang sa mas
mataas na tuition kahit ikumpara sa unang taon sa kolehiyo), o sumama sa lumulobong
hanay ng mga kabataang hindi nag-aaral. Iniaalok ng rehimeng Aquino ang dalawang
madaliang lunas na magpapabilis lamang sa pribatisasyon at hihikayat sa korupsyon:
(1) ang SHS voucher system na sa batayay parsyal na subsidyo sa senior na mga
mag-aaral sa mataas na paaralan para bayaran ang pag-enroll sa paaralang pribado
na kalahok sa sistemang voucher; at (2) ang PPP for School Infrastructure Project
(SIP) na binabayaran ng gobyerno ang mga pribadong kontraktor para gumawa ng
dagdag na silid-aralan ayon sa programang itayo-ipaupa (build-lease).
Nasa ilalim ng Education Voucher System at Education Service Contracting,
na kapwa halatang pakana sa pribatisasyon ayon sa Government Assistance Program
to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE) na suportado ng World
Bank. Ang pamamahala ng GASTPE ay matagal nang ikinontrata ng Departamento sa
Edukasyon sa Private Education Assistance Committee (PEAC) ng Fund for Assistance
to Private Education (FAPE). Ang alokasyon ng badyet ng GASTPE, na kakatiting
noong dekadang 1990 ay umakyat sa Php 20 bilyon sa siyam na taong itinagal ng
rehimeng Arroyo, lumobo sa Php 34 bilyon sa unang limang taon ng masamang
pamamahalang Aquino, at lolobo pang lalo sa Php 20 bilyon sa 2016 lamang. Ang
gastos na tulong-gobyerno sa pribadong edukasyon ay lumaki nang katakut-takot at
napakadaling abusuhin kaya maging ang Komisyon sa Patutuos ng Kwenta, na di man
awtorisadong magtuos ng kwenta ng GASTPE, ay tumututol sa buong pribatisadong
kaparaanan sa PEAC-FAPE.
14

Intensyon man o hindi, nakaakmang bawasan nang malaki ng K-12 ni Aquino

ang mga posisyon sa pagtuturo sa kolehiyo dala ng inaasahang matinding pagbagsak
ng enrollment sa unang taon sa kolehiyo sa susunod na dalawang taon. Tinatayang
78,000 mga guro sa kolehiyo at empleyado ang mawawalan ng trabaho o ibababa sa
pagiging guro sa mataas na paaralan na mas mababa ang sweldo kung mailulugar
sila sa mga trabahong antas-SHS. Ipinapakita ng ganitong pag-aalis lamang ang rurok
ng ng kawalang kakayahan sa pagpaplano at di pagpansin sa karapatang paggawa.
Kung sumahin, inihahantad ng K-12 ni Aquino ang paglubha ng krisis sa
edukasyon sa Pilipinas at ang pagwawalang-bahala ng gobyerno sa karapatan ng
mamamayan sa edukasyon sa harap ng mga opensibang neoliberal. Ang pagsunod
sa mga diktang pataw ng US sa edukasyon ay hindi ikalulutas ng seryosong suliranin
ng Pilipinas sa kawalang trabaho at sa pagdaragdag ng seguridad sa trabaho ng
mga manggagawang Pilipino, na nakaugat sa mas pundamental na mga suliranin ng
pagkaatrasado tulad ng kawalan ng tunay na industriyalisasyon at reporma sa lupa.
Kung gagamitin mang sukatan ang reputasyon (o track record) ng gobyerno kaugnay
ng edukasyong publiko, magiging bagong larangan lamang ang K-12 ni Aquino para
sa pribatisasyon at mga PPP, pag-utang sa dayuhan at korupsyon, samantalang
magpapatuloy ang pagharap ng mga tapos sa K-12 na papasok sa pwersang paggawa
ang gayon pa ring mga suliraninmatinding kawalan ng trabaho, mababang sahod, at
panganib sa pangingibang bansa para magtrabaho.
Sa teorya, pwedeng magbunsod ang isang programang K-12, na may angkop
na oryentasyon, plano at pamamahala, ng tunay na mga repormang totoong
pakikinabangan ng mamamayan at kabataang Pilipino sa larangan ng edukasyon.
Magagawa ng isang totoong patriyotiko, makamasa at syentipikong sistema ng
edukasyon na magsanay ng milyung-milyong kabataan, tumulong na bigyang
kapangyarihan ang mamamayan at itayo ang bansa nila sa pamamagitan ng pinataas
na kamulatang panlipunan, kaalamang syentipiko at mga kabihasaang teknikal
habang nag-aambag din sa pangkalahatang pagsulong ng kaalaman at pag-unlad ng
tao sa pandaigdigang saklaw.
Tiyak na mabibigo ang K-12 ng pangkating Aquino dahil sa bulag na pagsunod
nila sa mga among neoliberal, at sariling maling mga priyoridad at kawalang
kakayahan.
III. Mga Panawagan sa Pagkilos

Ang International League of Peoples Struggle ay nananawagan sa mamamayan

ng lahat ng bansa laluna sa rehiyong Asya-Pasipiko na ilantad at labanan ang mga
opensibang neoliberal sa pangungunang US na lingid na nakaabang sa loob at paligid
ng APEC. Partikular tayong nananawagan sa mamamayang Pilipino na mag-organisa
at kumilos sa mga pulong pag-aaral at aksyong protesta para tumulong sa lubusang
paglalantad ng mga susing pulong ng APEC sa Manila at ibang mga lungsod sa
Pilipinas, at pati ng maaasahang kalalabasan ng mga ito.
Sadyang nananawagan tayo sa kabataang Pilipino na ipagpatuloy na
ilantad at labanan ang ibat ibang pakanang repormang neoliberal sa edukasyon,
15

at ipaglaban ang sistema ng edukasyon na tunay na makabayan, makamasa, at

syentipiko batay sa pambansang industriyalisasyon, tunay na repormang agraryo,
at pamamahalang batay sa mga karapatang demokratiko. Kabilang sa mga atas ng
kilusang kabataan-estudyante sa Pilipinas ang magsilbing kilusang propaganda para
sa pambansang kasarinlan at demokrasya, malalim na makisalamuha sa hanay ng
masang manggagawa at magsasaka, at abutin ang mga kababayan nila na nag-aaral at
nagtatrabaho sa ibayong dagat, at magpahayag din ng pakikiisa sa pamamagitan ng
pagpapatibay ng ugnayan sa mga katapat nila sa anti-imperyalistang pandaigdigang
kilusang kabataan.
Panahon nang harapin ng mga mamamayan ng Asya-Pasipiko ang mga
isyung nakapaligid sa APEC, iugnay ang mga ito sa global na krisis ng kapitalismo,
pareho sa mga sentro ng imperyalismo at sa mga neokolonya, at isulong nang may
panibagong lakas ang pakikibaka para sa pambansang kasarinlan, demokrasya, at
tunay sa pag-unlad ng lipunan at ekonomya batay sa katarungan. May tiwala tayo na
ang mga mamamayan sa Asya-Pasipiko ipaglalaban nila ang pambansang soberanya,
demokrasya, industriyal na pag-unlad at kulturang makabayan, siyentipiko at
makamasa. Tiyak na tatahakin nila ang landas ng pakikibaka para makaalpas sila
sa kasalukuyang global na krisis at sa ehemonya (gahum) ng mga imperyalista,
para makamit ang pambansa at sosyal na kalayaan at para magtayo ng wastong
panrehiyong kooperasyon.
Maraming salamat.

16

17

18

Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

The Parallax View of

Alienation and Anomie
through the Monetization
of Education: Interview
on Teachers Day using
Young Karl Marx, Emile
Durkheim, George Simmel
Jasmin Ado, Bernard Santos, Moises P. Jusoy & Marc Del Christian P. Reyes
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

19

20

The Parallax View of Alienation and Anomie

through the Monetization of Education:
Interview on Teachers Day using Young Karl
Marx, Emile Durkheim, George Simmel
Jasmin Ado, Bernard Santos, Moises P. Jusoy & Marc Del Christian P. Reyes

THE MISEDUCATION
Under a rainy mid-afternoon at Mendiola in the midst of a meaningful protest where
I have interviewed Jolly Dugot, a fresh graduate of Secondary Education Major in
Filipino from Philippine Normal University this year who is currently working fulltime at (Alliance of Concerned Teachers) ACT Party list and as a full-time person
dedicated to the partylist, he was still able to discuss the current problems about
Education today since he is constantly connected with his co-educators. As a fresh
graduate, he is yet to teach at High Schools and while preparing himself to get there,
he is aware of the personal troubles and national issues about Education. He said
that he is currently working full-time for ACT Party list so he can help to raise the
call for an across-the-board teachers salary increase and other national issues
about education that needs to be address. He said that many teachers today may be
celebrating World Teachers Day but to them, its just a mere faade since there still
lots of issues on education today that we still have to face.
He said that the current provided benefits do not do any good at all for the
teachers and the only way for them to make their ends meet most of the time is to get
loans from government sectors (e.g. GSIS) or peddle other goods than their teachings
to the students who are badly rationed to their teachers. Because of this lack of Quality
and Quantity of Education, lots of students go home to their homes learning nothing
which was worsened when K+12 system that was proposed by the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund which was brought by the state to ensure that these
students will have additional two years of studying for vocational units and taking
off Philippine History to numb their young consciousness and Filipino to numb their
very own mother tongue to send out of the country and serve the well-developed
countries even without considering the horrible situation of the Philippine System
of Education.
While the system leaves the economic needs of the teachers which was proven
during Pres. B.S Aquinos stay for 5 years in his seat while tuition fees, oil and food
are increasing which takes a heavier toll for all teachers to face their everyday lives.
Even if there were provided Incentives/Bonuses, these does not appeal to the actual
needs of the teachers what they need is an actual and liveablesalary increase where
21

they would be able to propagate a national, scientific and mass-oriented education

to ward of the fascist education that we are currently on now.
Majority of the teachers in the Philippines are property-less workers and
Marx said that property-less workers are the ones who first-hand experiences
impoverishment, estrangement and alienation to the world. And in some cases, the
teacher is afraid of the products that he is creating because the products that he
createsare capable of being antagonistic to himself as a teacher. Most of the time, the
teacher does not feel the fruits of his own labour, and often feels estranged the more
he teaches when they are supposed to enable themselves in externalizing what is
good from their insides through the children that they teach. In the time of capitalism,
teachers no longer teach as a natural spring of spontaneous act of creativity but it is
forced to be performed for the capitalists and these situations both apply in public
and private schools.
Why is it so? Borrowing from the words of Marx Modern Work is Alienated,
teachers today are being dehumanized by them being recognized as specialized
expendables for they are expected to create lesson plans that will make sure that
all of the things that student needs to know in a lesson can fit within 30-45 minutes,
trying to generate instructional materials from their own pockets aside from feeding
themselves and their own children as they try to fit everything that they could ever
fit with their appalling wages could make you ask yourself why is life getting harder
when you are already working as much as you can as you teach more than 6 hours
a day even if you try to sell Avon, longganisa and other things to your students and
competing with your other co-teachers are really alienating and not competing and
overworking might cost them to lose their jobs, their punch cards now have become
their gods.
Marx said that work should be the window for the workers to see themselves
in the objects that they are creating where in the time of capitalism, teachers often
find a hard time seeing themselves in their students and most of the time tries to
guarantee their existence and dependence with their employers.In the time of
capitalism, the teacher exists as a teacher only when he exists for himself as a capital;
and he exists as a capital only when some capital exists for him. The existence of
capital is his existence, his life; as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner
indifferent to him. The young Karl Marx has known and has said that we all fear of
being abandoned and for that, we should always have a place in the worlds heart,
indeed a teachers heart knows how to love his or her students but should we let
Capitalism take and destroy this love?
Aside from their roles as teachers, they sometimes replace janitors in cleaning
the classrooms together with their students, these teachers also in sometimes get
killed while they try to secure the votes of the people during elections as ballot
watchers. They have sacrificed so much for this country as heroes are most of the
time unrecognized by the state, often neglected with their actual needs yet these
teachers still try to pursue what is great for their students, often given thankless to
teach is to love.
22

In Private Schools, the teachers get paid little while the School owners get
richer and as for public schools, the state saves funds from starving our Education
sector and puts these saved funds on another government sector or elsewhere.
According to Marx, the Capitalists and the State will shrink the workers wage as much
as they can for wider profit margins. To Marx, profit is simply theft that stealing the
talent and the hard work of the workforce is nothing but a fancy term for exploitation.
With this case, organized rallies and protests are often observed in societies where
Capitalism is prevailing because according to Marx Capitalism is very unstable that
it is constructed under a series of crises which will result a hundred or maybe a
thousand more marches and rallies of many different sectors which in turn can also
be bad for capitalists as well since they have forgotten how to put love in the middle
of their hearts and have forced themselves to put their very own economic reasons
in the middle of it in the supposed place of love because for them, everything and
everyone is treated in terms of utility and price to secure their own survival, making
them susceptible to insecurity, unhealthy competition, political complacency which
in the long run betray them as capitalists. The latter may have tried to ameliorate the
situation, but mostly for the sake of impression that capitalism has a conscience
that is, far from its really-existing paradox.
As capitalists accumulate wealth, their needs become more refined. Workers
just need to adjust their needs downward in misery and thrift by all means. Selfdenial becomes a cardinal virtue. In the age of capitalism, we may all have forgotten
how to truly love and of course, the sole solution for all these suffering and the loss of
love that we are experiencing now, and to recover our losses, is a social revolution.
THE MONETIZED EDUCATION

During the celebration of world teachers day across the country, some teachers
took this as an opportunity to mobilize and ask for the government a little change
about the current status of the public school teachers. We joined the mobilization
that was happened from Morayta in Manila going to Mendiola. (Personally that was
my first experience to join such mob.) As a graduate of BS in Secondary Education,
and as a former teacher also, I know what those teachers feel. But while doing some
of our interviews, I was a little bit shocked on how the teachers react in such many
situations in their current profession.
I interviewed an elementary teacher from Malate, Manila. She is on his 29th
year in service while her husband was on his 31st year. I asked her what are the
problems encountered of the public school teachers. The number one problem is
the salary increase that they have been waiting for over a couple of years ago. She
discussed that even though she earns 20k+ per month, it is not enough to send their
kids to school especially now that 3 of his kids are now in college. And most of the
time they received their salary too late (delayed). It forces them to borrow or lend
money from everyone. Because of this, they cannot save money because they need to
pay their debt plus the interest. I ask her why she did not shift into another career,
23

wherein she can earn more money. She simply told us that, I love teaching. I have
the passion to continue to teach even if I earned small amount. I stayed as a teacher
because of happiness. On those things that she told us, she is not fighting only to
gain for herself, but shes doing it for all the teachers in our country. She wants to get
her salary higher not to become rich, but to make it exact for their family.

In the book of George Simmel the Philosphy of Money he discussed how
money changes the lives of the people. We all know that money is only a tool, and
yet it is always viewed as an end result of whatever we do. I do agree to Simmel that,
money can determine the value of everything. We know that being a public school
teacher is not a joke. Teachers are not treated as well as the doctors, engineers who
earn more than a teacher. Doctors and other professions are more respected than
the teachers because they earn more money. While the teachers received only low
respect from the society. Teaching may be the noblest profession because it debunks
the thinking of I need to earn more money. These teachers that we encountered in
Mendiola are fighting for their salary increase but if you listen to them you will just
understand. They are not being monetized. They are just fighting for the money that
will keep them alive for what they needs not for what they want.
THE ANOMIE OF ALIENATION
The next essay focuses on the concept of anomie of Durkheim particularly
the function of our educational system. As explained above, the teacher as alienated
worker is to be considered as the product of anomic system where their experience
of alienation connoting the system of education itself that it was experiencing the
anomie or abnormality that results the breakdown of solidarity in Durkhemian
sense.
As Marx points out in his Philosophic Manuscript 1844, the idea of alienation
denoting the problem of alienated labor that involves both surrender of control over
work and its product, the workers disengagement from work and fellow worker,
the powerlessness, and self-estrangement of the human person. The concept of
Marx alienation focus on the subjective experience of the worker due to objective
abnormality or rather the pain of contradictionwhich more particular in his
relation to labor-work, fellow workers, and in his own self. On the other hand, the
Durkhemianconcepts of anomie (normlessness) focus more on the state of society or
to the partial system of the whole not only to the person or subjective experience but
more in objective abnormality yet we cannot deny that the implications for persons
state of mind are surely present in his works. Furthermore, the second essay tries
to connect the Marxist point of view of alienation together with the point of view
of Durkheim regarding anomie as their common ground of dialectical contradiction
both in subjective and objective experience of the worker-teacher and our lens to
interpret our empirical interview regarding the common subjective and objective
struggle of the teachers and the situation of our educational system.
24

During our protest at mendiola together with these teachers in private and
public schools shouting for reparation of dilapidated educational system in our
country they wereostensibly joining the mob that shows their position as progressive
teachers and could be considered as alienated workers in the dilapidated system of
education. They were marching to mendiola to address the issuesof wage-labourto
increase for the worker especially the public teachers, the lack of total benefits
especially in health, the issue of contractualization of work in public sector, the
misplace of budget in education (budget cut), the lack of means for education like
schools, books, chairs, etc , andthe lack of Quality and Quantity of Education where
lots of students go home to their homes learning nothing which was worsened when
K+12 system that was proposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
These are the issues that rose and the words that came out from the mouth of the
protesting teachers.
These issues that addressed by the teachers is empirically a phenomenon of
alienation in behalf of their subjective experience as teacher. First, their alienation
as subjected to drudge and menial work where they taught more than hundreds of
students everyday due to congestion of volume of students and perhaps it effects
them psychologically and physically especially to their health (some of the teachers
have cancer due to exhaustive use of their body in teaching) and implicitly most of
the teachers in public school turn into zombies and teacher machines because of
the huge number of students; second, their alienation from government benefits as
their life support like lack of health support, very low salary andvery poor regarding
retirement benefits; third, their alienation from other teachers (competition of
position for the upgrade of their salary); fourth, the absence or the displacement of
educational budget as public fund as one of the major effects to all the teachers (also
to the students) because they are oblige to buy materials for teaching and learning
using their low salary; fifth, their alienation from their family and love life because
of the level of demand and focus in teaching (no doubt that 40% of teachers are
bachelors and do not have the time to search for their lifetime partner); and lastly,the
type of educational system (K-12 program) the mode of production of education
where the quality of education is declining and the quantity of students rapidly
increase due to the scarcity of schools and teachers. So what is the effect of this kind
of alienation to our fellow teachers? To some extent if all the teachers suffers this type
of system in education. The worst victim of this alienation is not only the position of
the teachers but the situation of the students generally.No fund for schools, books,
and other necessities/means for education. All of them are in the state of alienation
where their experiences both subjective and objective are inter-connected andlots
of students go home to their homes learning nothing andthe worst is when K+12
systems applied the government has no budget for education. They want to push the
implementation to cope with the neoliberal type of educationyet being not prepared
to compete with the globalization. Furthermore, to paraphrase Durkheim, the K-12
mode of education, of globalized modelof education promotes the so-called organic
solidarity type of Education; organic solidarity type means a modern society living
in the structure of division of labor. Therefore, the K-12 education is a framework to
25

sharpen the division of labor within the educational systemtowards organic society
of globalization.
The educational system as part of social structure has a vital factors in our
society to produce and reproduce good and critical students. This is the reason
why the government has the responsibility to include education in public budget
in order to support the life of the teacher and sustain the means for education that
necessarily use in (re)production of students for the benefit of our social structures.
It is was already registered in the collective consciousness of everybody, the function
of education in norms (law), the values of moral education, and the crucial role of
academic circle in society that shape and mould the mind of young students. However,
the role of education in our country is in the state of emergency or crisis and the
Durkhemian concept of anomie is present in our educational system known as the
anomie of alienation, where teachers and students experienced of being not part of
the norm or system of ruling government/structures under the neo-liberal policy of
globalized mode of education and the system of education itself become unlawful
and does not correspond to the authentic function of structure to serve the students
and teachers. Our education is paralyze regarding in budget and it was effected on
the systemic adjustment of our government regarding the onslaught of globalization.
This onslaught also promotes commercialization within our educational system. The
college and state universities does not serve the education for students but penetrate
by bureaucratic system of commercialization where the students does not treat as
student but a mere customers like the costumers of SM Malls. To the extent that
it is the direct manifestation of globalization and the mirror of neo-liberal policy
of education through privatization of education and the means for education like
schools, school property, etc... The onslaught of privatization in every public sector
especially the sector of education as sub-system of social structure was anomized
(state of anomie) and the circle of education was change into perverted form of norm
(lessness) due to business and commercialization that compromises the school in
the name of profits. It elucidates the thread of globalization, the hidden hand of neoliberal policy of commercialization of education that apropos to the logic of existing
yet dilapidated Capitalism. The emergence of neo-liberal policy does not correspond
to the harmonious structure of society (in Durkhemian perspective). The penetration
of Capitalism towards education bureaucratized the system of education like the case
of UP and the prevailing issue of Budget Cut in education.
Thus, what is the dialectical perspective of alienation and anomie regarding the
issue of our educational system as one of the affected in monetization sub-structure
in our society? The concept of alienation of Marx,workers disengagement from work
and fellow worker, the powerlessness, self-estrangement of the human person, and
the alienation of worker from his product, is the intrinsic product of commercialized
education of market economy, the expected development of organic solidarity of
Durkheim and through the highest development of modern organic solidarity has
reach its own opposite, the anomie of educational system under the flag of monetized
education of neo-liberal policy. Hence, the appearance of subjective suffering of
teachers and students dialectically connected to the objective suffering of whole
26

system of education. The anomie of commercialized education was internalized by

the teachers and students and unexpectedly invested the experience of alienation. If
our education is in the state of anomie commercialization and privatization theres
no doubt that the experience of alienation by the teachers and students is correlated
to the system of anomie in social structure. Thus, anomie is alienation and alienation
is anomie through profit monetization of education!
EDUCATION AS A PASSION CALLED LOVE
After hearing the stories of the teachers we interviewed in Mendiola, I finally
understood why they were there, why were they protesting, why did they spend
their day (Teachers day) in the streets instead of celebrating it in their schools or
taking the chance to get some rest. Our teachers, our heroes, the ones who are in
charge of forming and educating the future generation, the future of our country,
are facing various problems and issues on their own. Coming from the teachers
themselves, their problem on low salary: kulang na kulang ang aming sahod para
sa pangangailangan ng pamilya ko. Pero ok lang, para sa mga bata.; lack of benefits:
mababa na nga sahod kulang pa sa benepisyo; the issue of contractualization:
madaming hindi permanente sa mga kasama naming kaya walang natatanggap na
bonus at ibang benepisyo; and the lack of support from the government; ultimo
mga gamit sa skwelahan kaming mga teachers ang nagpprovide, walang budget ang
school para dito, paano kami magtuturo, kawawa ang mga bata, kaya kami na rin
ang bumibili. These are just some of the things that pushed our teachers to go out
in the streets and asked for a little change that the government might or can do.
Because of these issues, (especially the issue on budget cut) the quality of education
in our schools is being sacrificed. Adding to this, K+12 system is being introduced
even if the teachers themselves are not convinced that we are ready to have such
system. Teachers, are given more load and work than they can handle and they are
not being properly compensated for these. Dehumanization is experience by our
teachers because of heavy work. They experience impoverishment, estrangement
and alienation not just in work but also with their families and neighbors. With all
these sacrifices, these abuses that they are experiencing, still, they dont receive
proper compensation. We can see here how Capitalism, being the orientation of our
State, will try to minimize the workers wage as much as they can for wider profit
margins, not considering what sacrifices their workers did and are continually doing
for them. Salaries, minimal benefits small amount of bonuses are just used to mask
this exploitation.
Today, education becomes a commodity rather that a right. We see education
as the key in solving the issue on poverty but ironically, if you are poor you wont
be able to gain proper education where in fact, as we have said, the only way out
of the poor condition you are in is through education. Does this mean poor people
have no choice and have no way out of the poverty they are experiencing? Im afraid
the answer to this question is YES. If the government will not act upon the issues
27

on education, if they will continue to ignore the voices of the masses that calls for
reforms; if we, the citizens who shares the same problem with our fellow teachers
and those deprived of education, wont do any action, the answer will always be YES.
Education, something that is supposed to be done with love is now being monetized
in this era of Capitalism. In this time were money or profit weighs more than every
individuals right; wherein the rational will of the capitalists takes over the natural
will of most people; wherein alienation and dehumanization is permitted all for
moneys sake, we should do something, we must say something. We should not let
our sense of Community, our sense for service and our passion on the things that we
do be destroyed by Capitalism. Indeed, now I understand why Teachers went out
there in the streets of Mendiola, it was all because of love, a passion called love. Their
love for their teaching, their love for their students, and their love for education led
them there. As Frantz Fanon said: Whenwe revolt its notfor aparticular culture.We
revolt simply because, for many reasons,we can no longer breathe. I salute all the
brave teachers that we met in Mendiola who voiced their hearts out, challenging the
government to do something. Your students and our country are blessed to have
educators like you. May you continue to serve with love even in this time of capitalism
and neo-liberal era that we have. May we, someday, in solidarity with all the voices
that were left unheard, achieve the desires and ideals that we long for. In omnibus
amare et sevire, in everything love and service for the people.

28

29

30

NATIONAL
DEMOCRATIC
SCHOLARSHIP

31

32

Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

Nation/State, Nationalism
and Global Violence
E. San Juan, Jr.
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

33

34

Nation/State, Nationalism
and Global Violence
E. San Juan, Jr.
After the excesses of fascism in World War II and the inter-ethnic conflicts in Africa,
the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia, it became axiomatic for postmodernist
thinkers to condemn the nation and its corollary terms, nationalism and nationstate, as the classic evils of modern industrial society. The nation-state, its reality if
not its concept, has become a kind of malignant paradox if not a sinister conundrum.
It is often linked to violence and the terror of ethnic cleansing. Despite this the
United Nations and the interstate system of nation-states still function as seemingly
viable institutions of everyday life. After September 11, 2001, the U.S. nation-state
is evolving into a besieged homeland, hence the zealous enforcement of national
security measures. How do we explain these seemingly paradoxical trends?

Let us review the inventory of charges made against the nation-state and its
cognate concepts. Typically described in normative terms as a vital necessity of modern
life, the nation-state emerged after the breakup of the medieval Christian empire.
It has employed violence to accomplish questionable endscolonial annexation of
territories, conquest of markets, systematic extermination of natives. Its disciplinary
apparatuses for war and pacification are indicted for committing unprecedented
barbarism. Examples of disasters are the extermination of indigenous peoples in
colonized territories by civilizing nations, the Nazi genocide of Jews and inferiorized
populations, and most recently ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Ruwanda,
Sri Lanka, and so on. Pursuing a line of thought elaborated by Elie Kedourie, Partha
Chatterjee, and others, Alfred Cobban (1994) asserted a widely shared view that the
theory of nationalism has proved to be one of the most potent agencies of destruction
in the modern world. In certain cases, nationalism mobilized by states competing
against other states has become synonymous with totalitarianism and fascism.
Charles Tilly (1975), Michael Howard (1991), and Anthony Smith (1979) all concur
in the opinion that war and the military machine are principal determinants in the
shaping of nation states. In The Nation-State and Violence, Anthony Giddens defines
nationalism as the cultural sensibility of sovereignty (note the fusion of culture and
politics) that unleashes administrative power within a clearly demarcated territory,
the bounded nation-state (1985: 219). Although it is allegedly becoming obsolete
under the pressure of globalization (for qualifications, see Sassen [1998] ), the
nation-state is considered by legal modernists (Berman 1995) as the prime source
of violence against citizens and entire peoples.
35

Postmodernist critiques of the nation (often sutured with the colonialist/

imperialist state) locate the evil in its ideological nature. This primarily concerns the
nation as the source of identity for modern individuals via citizenship or national
belonging (Taylor 1999), converting natal filiation (kinship) into political affiliation.
Identity implies definition by negation, inclusion based on exclusion underwritten by
a positivist logic of representation (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). But these critiques
seem to forget that the nation is chiefly a creation of the modern capitalist state, that
is, a historical artifice or invention. As Giovanni Arrighi observes, the Settlement of
Westphalia which ended the Thirty-Year War marked the reorganization of political
space in the interest of capital accumulation and signaled the birth, not just of
the modern inter-state system but also of capitalism as a world-system (1993:
162). Under this imperialist world system, Nikolai Bukharin reminds us, the state
power sucks in almost all branches of production; it not only maintains the general
conditions of the exploitative process; the state more and more becomes a direct
exploiter, organizing and directing production as a collective capitalist (Callinicos
1982: 205).

It is a truism that nation and its corollary problematique, nationalism, presupposes

the imperative of hierarchization and asymmetry of power in a political economy of
general exchange. The prime commodity exchanged is now labor-power. Founded on
socially constructed myths or traditions, the nation is posited by its proponents as
a normal state of affairs used to legitimize the control and domination of one group
over others. Such ideology has to be demystified and exposed as contingent on the
changing grid of social relations; that is, on how domination by force is legitimized
via the state. Pierre Bourdieus reformulation of Max Webers formula of the state as
the agency monopolizing the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over
a definite territory/population may be useful here: The state is the culmination
of a process of concentration of different species of capital; capital of physical force
or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural or (better)
informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such which
constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of metacapital granting power over other
species of capital and over their holders (1998: 41-42).

This meta-capital, more precisely statist capital (Bourdieu 1991; 1992) enables the
dominant class to articulate the field of national identity, the habitus of national
belonging, to reinforce the prevailing ownership/allocation of economic and symbolic
capital. A critique of essentialist nationalism, or its expression in bodily beliefs,
passions and dispositions that make up the habitus of racism, cannot succeed unless
it enables the transformation of the conditions of the production and transformation
of dispositions (Bourdieu 2000: 180), conditions which are social constructs or
artifacts resulting from historical struggles.

This heuristic notion of the state as distinguished from the nation in the field
of social power eludes postcolonial thinking. Postcolonial theory claims to expose
the artificial and arbitrary nature of the nation: This myth of nationhood, masked
36

by ideology, perpetuates nationalism, in which specific identifiers are employed to

create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of national traditions (Ashcroft et
al 1998, 150). Such signifiers of homogeneity not only fail to represent the diversity
of the actual nation or body politic, but also serves to impose the interests of a
section of the community as the general interest. One example is the imposition
of Englishness on the heterogeneous constituencies of the United Kingdom after
World War II, as Stuart Hall (1997) recently pointed out. But this is not all. In the
effort to make this universalizing intent prevail, the instrumentalities of state power-the military and police, religious and educational institutions, judiciary and legal
apparatuses--are deployed. Hence, from this orthodox postcolonial stance, the
nation-state and its ideology of nationalism are alleged to have become the chief
source of violence and conflict since the French Revolution.
Anatomy of Violence

Mainstream social science regards violence as a species of force which violates,

breaks, or destroys a normative state of affairs. It is coercion tout court. Violence is
often used to designate force devoid of legitimacy or legally sanctioned authority.
Should violence as an expression of physical force always be justified by political
reason in order to be meaningful and therefore acceptable? If such a force is used
by a state, an inherited political organ legitimized by the people or the nation,
should we not distinguish between state-defined purposes and in what specific way
nationalist ideologies or nation-making mechanisms are involved in those state
actions? State violence and assertion of national identity need not be automatically
conflated so as to implicate nationalism--whose nationalism?-- in all class/state
actions in every historical period. It would ignore the historically specific field of
power (in Bourdieus sense) in which symbolic capital is deployed in the interests of
those who monopolize statist capital. Devoid of such specification, postcolonialists
tend to indulge in an absolutist censure of nation-state power bereft of intentionality-in other words, power is reduced to violence construed as merely physical force
akin to tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on.
Violence, properly construed, signifies a political force that demands dialectical
triangulation in order to grasp how nation and state are implicated in it. We might
use, at this juncture, Hannah Arendts (1970) distinction between power as
the socially sanctioned ability to act in concert, force as the energy released
by physical or social movements, authority as a property that elicits obedience
without coercion, and violence as the instrumental use of implements to multiply
natural strength. Arendt notes how violence is often conflated with the power of
government, but this is a mistake. The power of the state really depends on whether
its commands are obeyed by its army or police forces who wield the instruments
of violence; thus, where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence
are of no use.Everything depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden
37

dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil
obedienceto laws, to rulers, to institutionsis but the outward manifestation of
support and consent from the citizenry (1970: 49; see also Benjamin 1978). In what
sense is the nation or the symbolic capital of nationalism utilized as an instrument of
violence or a means for legitimizing state power?

A materialist historicization of the phenomenon of nationalism is needed

to determine the complicity of individual states in specific outbreaks of violence.
Postcolonial criticism supposedly abhors totalization or generalization. But
postcolonialists like Homi Bhabha (1990) resort to a questionable use of the versatile
performativity of language to ascribe a semiotic indeterminacy to all nationalitarian
projects, reducing the multifarious narratives of nations/peoples to a formulaic
paradigm of hybridity and syncretism. Bhabhas absolutization of contingency and
local knowledge derived from Foucault, especially the dogma of singularity attached
to the event as the reversal of a relationship of forces (Foucault 1984; see Ebert
1996), rules out the sedimented potency of traditions, the counter-memory of populardemocratic revolts, and the structuring impact of habitus in regions and localities
deemed crucial in undermining colonial authority. While postcolonialists (Bhabha
1999) seek to expose the doubled or supplementary nature of the national sign in
order to open a critical space to alter the communal values of the dominant culture
and to allow the people to negotiate other possibilities in their placing between
object and subject status, they eliminate outright the nation-form as a possible vehicle
for popular struggles. The subalterns are forbidden to speak their own collective
ethos of insurgency in their ethnic idioms. While the state has governmentalized
power relations, analysis of the nation-state cannot exhaust the political economy of
power-knowledge (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982; Lemert and Gillan 1982). History is
reduced to the ambiguities of aleatory occurrences immanent in the arbitrary play
of textualities. This move rules out systematic critique and political intervention.
The social field of contending determinate forces represented by political parties
and diverse organizations cannot be conceived at all in the face of unintelligible
singularities defying the mediating categories of class, nation, race, gender, and so
on.
In this light, what makes the postcolonialist argument flawed becomes clear in its
non-referential semiotics (more on this later) and a kind of non-sequitur reasoning
justified by a general deconstructive, post-structuralist rationality. It is perhaps
easy to expose the contingent nature of the nation once its historical condition
of possibility is pointed out. But it is more difficult to argue that once its socially
contrived scaffolding is revealed, then the nation-state and its capacity to mobilize
and apply the means of violence can be restricted if not curtailed. Exposing the
artificiality of the nation is not the same as delegitimizing the violence of the state or
the political authority of the classes and groups manifest in juridical institutions and
state bureaucracy.
We can pose this question at this point: Can one seriously claim that once the
British state is shown to rest on the myth of the Magna Carta or the United States
38

government on the covenant of the Founding Fathers to uphold the interests of every
citizen--except of course African slaves and other non-white peoples, then one has
undermined the power of the British or American nation-state? Not that this is an
otiose, wrong-headed task. Debunking has been the classic move of those protesting
against an unjust status quo purporting to be the natural and normal condition for
everyone. But it should not be mistaken as a substitute for the actual organized
resistance of the oppressed and exploited multitudes.

It is not superfluous here to counsel ourselves again: the weapon of criticism,

as Marx once said, needs to be reinforced by the principled criticism of weapons.
If we want to guard against committing the essentialist dogmatism of the imperial
nationalists, we need a historicizing strategy of ascertaining how force--the energy of
social collectivities--turns into violence for the creation or destruction of social orders
and singular life-forms. The sovereignty struggle of aboriginal groups has become a
crucible for testing solidarity or betrayal. Understood as embodying the pathos of an
elemental force, the insurrectionary movements of indigenes have been deemed the
source of a dynamic primordial energy that feeds the legal Modernist composite of
primitivism and experimentalism, a fusion of radical discontinuity and reciprocal
facilitation (Berman 1995, 238). But the American Indians (as well as the native
Hawaiians) are asserting a communal right to lands they have been dispossessed
of; their struggles for self-determination, coeval with the rise of the imperial nationstate, belong to a kind of modernity not comprehended by postcolonial doctrine.
The question of the violence of the nation-state thus hinges on the linkage
between the two categories, nation and state. A prior distinction perhaps needs
to be made between nation and society since these two are often muddled in
postcolonial discourse. While the former may be ordered, the [latter] orders itself
(Brown 1986). Most historical accounts remind us that the modern nation-state has
a beginning--and consequently, it is often forgotten--and an ending. But the analytic
and structural distinction between the referents of nation (local groups, community,
domicile or belonging) and state (Bourdieus meta-capital, governance, machinery
of sanctioning laws, disciplinary codes, military) is often elided because the force of
nationalism is often conflated with the violence of the state apparatuses, an error
compounded by ignoring the social classes involved in each sphere. This is the lesson
of Marx and Lenins necessary discrimination between oppressor and oppressed
nations--a nation that oppresses another cannot really claim to be free. Often the
symptom of this fundamental error is indexed by the formula of counterpointing
the state to civil society, obfuscating the symbiosis and synergy between them. This
error may be traced partly to the Hobbesian conflation of state and society in order
to regulate the anarchy of the market and of brutish individualism violating civil
contracts (Ollman 1993).

39

Mapping Nation Forms

Before dealing with how society was nationalized, it may be useful to recall the
metaphysics of the origin of the nation elaborated in Ernest Renans 1882 lecture,
What is a nation? This may be considered one of the originary locus of nationalism
(in Europe, at least) conceived as a primitivist revolt against the centralized authority
of modernizing industrial states. Renans idea of the nation as a kind of total destiny
finds resonance in Max Webers praise of the states capacity to impart meaning to
death, the state as a purposefully constructed, functionally specific machine (Poggi
1978: 101) which appeals to and mobilizes nationalist sentiments. While Renan
emphasized a community founded on acts of sacrifice and their memorialization, this
focus does not abolish the fact that the rise of the merchant bourgeoisie marked the
start of the entrenchment of national boundaries first drawn in the age of monarchical
absolutism. The establishment of the market coincided with the introduction of
taxation, customs, tariffs, etc., punctuated by the assertion of linguistic distinctions
among the inhabitants of Europe. Karl Polanyis thesis of The Great Transformation
(1957) urges us to attend to the complexities in the evolution of the nation-state in
the world system of commodity exchange. We also need to take into account Ernest
Gellners (1983) argument that cultural and linguistic homogeneity has served from
the outset as a functional imperative for states administering a commodity-centered
economy and its class-determining division of social labor.
A more empirically nuanced explanation for how society was nationalized is
provided by Etienne Balibar. Starting from the premise that the world-economy
is a system of constraints, not a self-regulating invariant system (as academic
globalization theory would have it), subject to the unpredictable dialectic of its
internal contradictions, Balibar describes how the privileged status of the nation form
derives from the fact that, locally, that form made it possible (at least for an entire
historical period) for struggles between heterogeneous classes to be controlled and
for not only a capitalist class but the bourgeoisies proper to emerge from these
state bourgeoisies both capable of political, economic and cultural hegemony and
produced by that hegemony (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 90). Thus, to resolve the
internal contradictions, the bourgeoisie restructured the state in the national form.
This nationalized state intervened (according to Balibar and Wallerstein) in the
very reproduction of the economy and particularly in the formation of individuals,
whereby individuals of all classes were subordinated to their status as citizens of
the nation-state, to the fact of their being nationals. The key term in this narrative of
nationalization is hegemony, in this instance capitalist hegemony (domination by
consent) based on the formal nationalization of citizenship.
This function of hegemony, now realized through the sublimation of class
contradictions in the nation form, is ignored by postcolonial theory. Postcolonialists
subscribe to a post-structuralist hermeneutic of nationalism as a primordial
40

destabilizing force devoid of rationality. And so while the shaping of the nation-state
in the centuries of profound social upheavals did not follow a transparent linear
trajectory--we have only to remember the untypical origins of the German and
Italian nation-states, not to speak of the often intractable nationalist mobilizations
in Greece, Turkey, and the colonized regionsthat is not enough reason to ascribe an
intrinsic negativity or belligerency to the nation as such. States may rise and fall, as
the absolute monarchs and dynasties did, but sentiments and practices constituting
the nation follow another rhythm or temporality not easily dissolved into the
vicissitudes of the modern expansive state. Nor does this mean that nations, whether
in the North or the South, exert a stabilizing and conservative influence on social
movements working for radical changes in the distribution of power and resources.

What seems obvious at this point is that the effects of state violence, or the
consequences of the instrumental application of force (following Arendt), cannot be
judged as damaging or healthy as such without defining clearly the actors/agents
involved, the purposes or ends of state activity, and the social field of forces in their
dialectical interaction at specific historical conjunctures and epochs. Otherwise,
jingoist, white-supremacist nationalism may be lumped with struggles for genuine
national autonomy or sovereignty on the ground that both invoke the nation.
In pursuing a historically situated analysis of violence, we need to avoid
collapsing the difference between the concept of the nation-state and the complex,
variegated import of nationalist agendas around the world. Whence originates the
will to exclude, to dominate? Philosophically, this has been traced to the dialectical
emergence of the communal universal self threatened by the violence of the Other in
Hegels philosophy. Politically, nationalism has served a practical function. According
to Anthony Giddens, what makes the nation integral to the nation-stateis not
the existence of sentiments of nationalism but the unification of an administrative
apparatus over precisely defined territorial boundaries in a complex of other nationstates (1987: 172). That is why the rise of nation-states coincided with wars and
the establishment of the military bureaucratic machine. From this perspective, the
state refers to the political institution with centralized authority and monopoly of
coercive agencies coinciding with the rise of global capitalism, while nationalism
denotes the diverse configuration of peoples based on the commonality of symbols,
beliefs, traditions, and so on.

Mindful of fundamentalist teleologies and moralisms, we need to guard against

confusing historical periods and categories. Imagining the nation unified on the
basis of secular citizenship and self-representation, as Benedict Anderson (1991)
once demonstrated, was only possible when print capitalism arose in conjunction
with the expansive state. But that in turn was possible when the trading bourgeoisie
developed the means of communication under pressure of market competition and
internal exigencies. Moreover, the dissemination of the Bible in different vernaculars
did not translate into a monopoly of violence by the national churches. In Latin
America, however, the nation as imagined community exhibited multiple symptoms
of abortive birth, stagnation, and premature decay, precipitated by mutations in the
41

social field in which the violence of the feudal/tributary landlord and slaveholding
classes collided with the predatory incursions of mercantile and industrial capitalism
(Franco 1997). It is obvious that the sense of national belonging, whether based
on clan or tribal customs, language, religion, etc., certainly has a historical origin
and localizing motivation different from the emergence of the capitalist state as
an agency to rally the populace to serve the needs of the commercial class and
the goal of accumulation. The uneven development of the colonized nation-states
led by compradors and feudal landlords, dependent formations which have been
thoroughly investigated by Samir Amin (1980), Peter Gran (1996), and others, needs
to be demarcated from the European metropolitan experience discussed by Balibar,
Giddens, and others.
Refusals and Denials

Given the rejection of a materialist analysis of the contradictions in any social

formation, postcolonial critics find themselves utterly at a loss in making coherent
sense of nationalism as a historically variegated phenomenon. The reason lies in
its adherence to the closure of conventionalist self-referentiality wrongly ascribed
to Saussure (Merquior 1986). Whereas, in Charles Sanders Peirces semiotics,
signs are not only limited to iconic and symbolic kinds, but also perform indexical
functions (reference to an experimentally verifiable world outside discourse),
postcolonial theory is locked in the prison-house of language and the vertigo of
ceaseless interpretation (Sheriff 1989). The community of interpretants disappears
(Rochberg-Halton 1986). Representations of the historicity of the nation give way to
a Nietzschean will to invent reality as polysemic discourse, a product of enunciatory
and performative acts. No wonder the nation becomes culpable of nationalist
aggression.

Postcolonial critics resort to a duplicitous if not equivocating stance in regard to

nation-centered cultures vis--vis diasporic cosmopolitanism (see Appadurai 1994;
Mohanty 1994). They perceive nationalism as an extremely contentious site in which
notions of self-determination and identity collide with notions of domination and
exclusion. Such oppositions, however, prove unmanageable indeed if a mechanical
idealist perspective is employed. That view in fact leads to an irresolvable muddle
in which nation-states as the field of antagonism for the extraction of surplus value
(profit) and free exchange of commodities also become violent agencies preventing
free action in a global marketplace that crosses national boundaries. Averse to
concrete historical grounding, postcolonialism regards nationalist ideology as
the cause of individual and state competition for goods and resources in the free
market, with this market conceived as a creation of ideology. I cite one postcolonial
authority who, in a mode of double-speak, attributes violence to the nation-state on
one hand and liberal disposition to the nation on the other:
42

The complex and powerful operation of the idea of a nation can be seen also
in the great twentieth-century phenomenon of global capitalism, where the
free market between nations, epitomized in the emergence of multinational
companies, maintains a complex, problematic relationship with the idea of
nations as natural and immutable formations based on shared collective
values. Modern nations such as the United States, with their multi-ethnic
composition, require the acceptance of an overarching national ideology (in
pluribus unum). But global capitalism also requires that the individual be
free to act in an economic realm that crosses and nullifies these boundaries
and identities (Ashcroft et al, 1998, 151).

First of all, it is misleading and foolish then to label the slogan

one in many as the U.S. hegemonic ideology. Officially the consensual
ideology of the U.S. is neoliberal democracy centered on a normative
utilitarian individualism with a neoSocial Darwinist orientation. U.S.
Manifest Destiny has been refurbished with a global modernizing mission:
witness Bosnia, Afghanistan, Colombia, and so on. The doctrine of formal pluralism
underwrites an acquisitive or possessive ethos that fits perfectly with mass
consumerism and the gospel of the unregulated market. Global finance capital and
business finds sanction in this brand of U.S. cosmopolitanism signaled by McDonald,
Microsoft/IBM, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood films (McChesney, Wood and
Foster 1998).
It is within this framework that we can comprehend how the ruling bourgeoisie
of each sovereign state utilizes nationalist sentiment and the violence of the state
apparatuses to impose their will. Consequently, the belief that the nation-state
simultaneously prohibits economic freedom and promotes multinational companies
actually occludes the source of political and juridical violence--for example, the war
against Serbia by the NATO (an expedient coalition of nation-states led by the United
States), or the stigmatization of rogue and terrorist states (North Korea, Iran,
Iraq, Afghanistanthe axis of evil) by the draconian standards of transnational
capitalism. One can then assert that the most likely source of political violence--and
I am speaking of that kind where collective energy and intentionality are involved-is the competitive drive for accumulation in the world market system where the
propertied class of each nation-state is the key actor mobilizing its symbolic capital
made up of ethnic loyalties and national imaginaries.
We have now moved from the formalistic definition of the nation as a historic
construct to the nation as a character in the larger all-encompassing plot of capitalist
development and imperial expansion. What role this protagonist has played and
will play is now the topic of controversy. It is not enough to simply ascribe to the
trading or commercial class the shaping of a new political form, the nation-state, to
replace city states, leagues, municipal kingdoms, and oligarchic republics. Why such
imagined communities should serve as a more efficacious political instrument
43

for the hegemonic bloc of property-owners, is the question which I have already
anticipated at the beginning of this essay.

Another approach to our topic is to apply dialectical analysis to the historical

record of national sovereignty alluded to earlier. Historians have described the
crafting of state power for the new bourgeois nations in Enlightenment philosophy.
During the emergence of mercantile capitalism Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius theorized
the sovereignty of the nation as the pivot of centralized authority and coercive power
(Bowle 1947). The French Revolution posited the people, the universal rights of
man, as the foundation of legitimacy for the state. In the passage from the nineteenth
to the twentieth century, the people as nation, the historical act of constituting the
polity as national-popular domain of public life, gradually acquires libidinal cathexis
enough to inspire movements of anticolonial liberation across national boundaries.
Its influence on the U.S. Constitution as well as on personalities like Sun Yat-Sen, Jose
Rizal, and other third world radical democrats has given the principle of popular
sovereignty a cross-cultural if not universal status (on Filipino nationalism, see San
Juan 2000). Within the system of nation-states, for Marxists, recognition of national
rights is an essential condition for international solidarity (Lowy 1998: 59) in the
worldwide fight for socialism and a class-less political order.
Nations thus differ in terms of who controls state-power and for what ends.
Capitalist states claim legitimacy in terms of the putative rule of the majority. The
universal principle of peoples rights is generally considered to be the basis of
state power for the modern nation, the empowerment, through this bureaucracy,
of the interests of the state conceived as an abstraction rather than as a personal
fiefdom (Ashcroft et al 1998, 153). A serious mistake occurs when the nation and
its legitimating principle of popular sovereignty becomes confused with the state
bureaucracy construed either as an organ transcending the interest of any single
class, or as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. A mechanical, not dialectical,
method underlies this failure to connect the ideology, politics, and economics of the
bourgeois revolution with the supremacy of the propertied class. This quasi-Hegelian
interpretation posits the popular will of the post-Renaissance nation-states as the
prime motor of world expansion, of 19th-century colonialism. Instead of regarding
the Westscivilizing mission as a program informed by the gospel of progress via
profit-making, postcolonialists consider the ideology of national glory tied to the
unifying signifiers of language and race.
Ideological justification in actuality precedes and accompanies colonial conquest
and domination. Nationalism, the need to superimpose the unifying myth of the
imperial nation-state, is not only generated by the bourgeois agenda of controlling
and regulating the space of its market, but also by the imperative of seizing markets
and resources outside territories and peoples. Nationalism is then interpreted by
postcolonial theorists as equivalent to colonialism; the nation is an instrument of
imperialist aggrandizement, so that if newly liberated ex-colonies employ nationalist
discourse and principles, they will only be replicating the European model whose
myths, sentiments, and traditions justified the violent suppression of internal
44

heterogeneities and differences. The decolonizing nation is thus pronounced an

oxymoron, a rhetorical if not actual impossibility. One example often adduced is Irish
cultural nationalism; its culturalist absolutism, in Seamus Deanes judgment, has
found in postcolonialism the future that it deserves (1998: 368).

Lacking any historical anchorage, the argument of postcolonial theory generates

inconsistencies due to an exorbitant culturalism and the concentration on diffuse
power networks inspired by Foucault (Smart 1985). Just as Foucault repudiated
Marxism for being an inversion of bourgeois political economy, postcolonialists
condemned nationalist thought for adopting the same essentialist, transcendental,
objectifying epistemology of Orientalism (Lazarus 1999). Foucault rejects
foundationalist historiography but succumbs to the fallacy of equating all questions
of law and sovereignty with monarchical absolutism. Gillian Rose has detailed the
numerous sophistries in Foucaults ontology of power in which juridico-discursive
concepts are refunctionalized after their negation by his rules of immanence,
continual variations, double conditioning, and technical polyvalence of discourse.
Foucault regards violence as endemic: By drawing on a theory of civil society without
a theory of the state Foucault does not open up the perspective of myriad powers
in place of the conventional sovereign and singular power, he introduces or posits
a spurious universal: warfare (Rose 1984: 200). Foucaults omnipresent power as
a constitutive subject in the Kantian or Husserlian sense (Callinicos 1989), or as
Nietzschean power-knowledge causing mischievous mayhem everywhere, finds its
resonance in the postcolonial repertoire of mimicry, ambivalence, indeterminacy, as
well as in the deconstructive methodology of the Subaltern Studies group (Callinicos
1995). This relativistic perspectivalism which ironically prescribes totalizing schemes
can not discriminate between the reactive nationalism of the oppressor and that of
the oppressed.
Rejection of the political economy of structured power relations leads to untenable
and spurious interpretations of the historical process. Because they disregard the
historical evolution of the nation-state discussed by Balibar, Anderson, Smith (1971),
among others, postcolonial critics uphold the sphere of culture as the decisive force
in configuring social formations. Not that culture is irrelevant in explaining political
antagonisms. Rather, it is erroneous when such antagonisms are translated into
nothing but the tensions of amorphous cultural differences. The dogma of cultural
difference (for Charles Taylor, the need and demand for recognition in a modern
politics of identity) becomes then the key to explaining subalternity, racism, and class
exploitation in subordinated, neocolonized formations. Ambivalence, hybridity, and
ludic interstitiality become privileged signifiers over against homogenizing symbols
and indices whose authority of cultural synthesis is the target of attack. Biopolitics,
disciplinary regimes of power/knowledge, and discursive performances serve as the
primary foci of analysis over against the practices of localized materialism and a
demonized economistic reductionism.

45

The limits of fetishisizing culture in postcolonial theory can be illustrated

briefly. The most flagrant evidence of the constrained parameters of the postcolonial
diagnosis may be found in its construal of racist ideology as the construction and
naturalization of an unequal form of intercultural relations (Ashcroft et al 1998,
46). If racism occurs only or chiefly on the level of intercultural relations, from this
constricted optic, the other parts of a given social formation (political, economic)
become superfluous and marginal. Politics is then reduced to an epiphenomenal
manifestation of discourse and instrumentalized language-games.
Fanons Intervention

In the fashionable discourse of postcolonialists, dependent nations and the

nationalism of neocolonized peoples are charged for being complicit with the
conduct of Western colonialism and its Enlightenment metanarrative. They become
anathema to deconstructionists hostile to any emancipatory project in the third
world inspired by egalitarian, socialist goals. This is the reason why postcolonial
critics have a difficult time dealing with Frantz Fanon (1961) and his engagement
with decolonizing mass violence as a strategic response of people of color to the
inhumane violence of occupying settlers and pillagers. Fanons invocation of a
nation-making principle is the direct antithesis to any culturalist syndrome, in fact an
antidote to it, because he emphasizes the organic integration of cultural action with
a popular-democratic program of subverting colonialism. Discourse and power are
articulated by Fanon in the dialectics of practice inscribed in the specific historical
conditions of their effectivity. Fanons theory of national liberation proves itself a true
concrete universal in that it incorporates via a dialectical sublation the richness of
the particulars embodied in the Algerian revolution and generalized in the revolt of
the impoverished majority, the wretched of the earth.

Given this historicizing method, Fanon refuses any demarcation of culture

from politics and economics. Liberation is always tied to the question of property
relations, the social division of labor, and the process of social reproductionall these
transvalued by the imperative of the radical transformation of colonial relations and
its Manichean subterfuge. Opposed to Fanons denunciation of abstract populism,
Bhabha and others (e.g., Said 1993) fetishize an abstract people located in diasporic
flux and borderline spaces. Such recuperation of colonial hegemony via a third
space or contrapuntal passage of negotiation reveals the comprador character of
postcolonial theories of translation and cultural exchange. Transcultural syncretism
devised to abolish the nation substitutes for anti-imperialist revolution a modus
vivendi of opportunist compromises.

National liberation and social justice via class struggle are interdependent. As
Leopoldo Marmora observes, While classes, in order to become predominant, have
to constitute themselves as national classes, the nation arises from class struggle
46

(1984, 113). This is why, for Marx and Engels, the proletariat in bondage to capital
does not have a countryunless it has constituted itself as the nation through
the ordeals of class war: Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the
proletariat is at first a national struggle, a fight for hegemonic leadership (1968: 22).
The popular-democratic aspiration for self-determination contains both national
and social dimensions. This also enables us to grasp the objective significance
invested in Gramscis ideal of the national-popular: proletarian hegemony as the
national collective will of the people built from alliances, compromises, affiliations,
and pedagogical sharing of national conditions and traditionsthe people, not the
bourgeoisie, become the nation (Forgacs 1993; Wertheim 1974).
For analytic purposes, we need to ascertain the distinction between the state
as an instrument of class interest and the nation/people as the matrix of emergent
sovereignty. The authority of the bourgeois state as regulative juridical organ
and administrative apparatus with a monopoly of coercive force derives from its
historical origin in enforcing individual, civic rights of freedom against the absolutist
monarchy. National identity is thus used by the state to legitimize its actions within a
delimited territory in the process of commanding the mobilization and coordination
of policy (Held 1992). Formally structured as a Rechststaat, the bourgeois nationstate functions to insure the self-reproduction of capital through market forces and
the continuous commodification of labor power (Jessop 1982). Fanon understands
that anti-colonial insurgency challenges the global conditions guaranteeing
valorization and realization of capital, conditions in which the internationalization
and nationalization of the circuits of capital are enforced by the bloc of capitalist
nation-states and its hegemony over the planet.

We can resolve the initial paradox of the nation, a Janus-faced phenomenon

(Nairn 1977), by considering the following historical background. The idea of stateinitiated violence (as opposed to communal ethnic-motivated violence) performs a
heuristic role in the task of historicizing any existing state authority and questioning
the peaceful normalcy of the status quo. The prevailing social order is then exposed
as artificial and contingent; what is deemed normal or natural reveals itself as an
instrument of partial interests. But the relative permanence of certain institutional
bodies and their effects need to be acknowledged in calculating political strategies.
The long duration of collective and individual memories exerts its influence through
the mediation of what Bourdieu (1993) calls habitus and its activation in various
fields of social transactions.

The space of the nation is always a field of conflict among social blocs for hegemony.
We begin to understand that the states hierarchical structure is made possible
because of the institutionalized violence that privileges the hegemony (moral and
intellectual leadership crafted via negotiating compromises) of a bloc of classes over
competing blocs and their alternative programs. Hegemony is always underwritten by
coercion (open or covert, subtle or crude) in varying proportions and contingencies.
The demarcated territory claimed by a state in rivalry with other states becomes for
47

Weber one major pretext for the state monopoly of legitimate violence in order to
defend private property and promote the overseas interests of the domestic business
class (Krader 1968). Historically the nation form, as mentioned earlier, becomes a
vehicle for unifying classes and groups under bourgeois hegemony.
Retrospective and Inventory

The classical Marxist view of violence rejects the utopian idealization as well
as the mechanical calculation of means-ends that vitiates the logic of Blanquist and
Sorelian conceptions of social change (Sorel 1908; 1972). Marx disavowed utopian
socialism in favor of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie through a combination of
violent and peaceful means depending on the ever-changing alignment of forces.
Instrumentalism is subordinated to a narrative of emancipation from class bondage.
The objective of emancipating labor associated with the nation/people requires the
exposure of commodity-fetishism and the ideology of equal exchange of values in
the market. Reification and alienation in social relations account for the bourgeois
states ascendancy. Where the state bureaucracy supporting the bourgeoisie and the
standing army do not dominate the state apparatus completely (a rare case) or has
been weakened, as in the case of the monarchy and the Russian bourgeoisie at the
time of the 1917 Revolution, the working class might attain their goal of liberation by
peaceful means; but in most cases, the lever of the revolution will have to be force
harnessed by the masses in solidarity, unified by a program of abolishing the entire
class system and its foundation.

Based on their historical inquiries, Marx and Engels understood the role of
violence as the midwife in the birth of a new social order within the old framework
of the nation-state. In his later years Engels speculated that with the changes in the
ideological situation of the classes in any national territory, a real victory of an
insurrection over the military in street fighting is one of the rarest exceptions. In
an unusual historic conjuncture, however, the Bolshevik revolution mobilized mass
strikes and thus disproved Engels. Nevertheless, Marxs analytical universality, to
use John Dunns (1979: 78) phrase, remains valid in deploying the concept of totality
to comprehend the nexus of state, class and nation. We can rehearse here the issues
that need to be examined from the viewpoint of totality: Was Lenins dictatorship
of the proletariat an imposition of state violence, or the coercive rule of the people
against the class enemy? If it is an instrumental means of the new proletarian state,
did it implicate the nation? Is violence here both structured into the state system of
apparatuses and inscribed in the collective agency of the working masses cognized
as the nation? Is the political authority invoked by the proletarian state embodied
in the class interest of all those exploited by capital (in both periphery and center)
ascendant over all?
Marxists critical of the Leninist interpretation denounce the use of state violence
as an anarchist deviation, an arbitrary application of force. They affirm instead the law48

governed historical process that will inevitably transform capitalism into socialism,
mainly through the spontaneous development of the productive forces, whatever the
subjective intentions of the political protagonists involved. Such fatalism, however,
rules out the intervention of a class-for-itself freed from ideological blinders and
uniting all the oppressed with its moral-intellectual leadership, the cardinal axiom
of socialist revolution (Lukacs 2000).

I think the most persuasive Marxist exposition on the role of violence in socialist
revolution is Maurice Merleau-Pontys Humanism and Terror (1947). Merleau-Ponty
displaces the problematic of means-ends by locating revolutionary action in the praxis
of the proletariat already at work in history: The proletariat is both an objective
factor of political economy and a system of subjective awareness, or rather a style
of coexistence at once fact and value, in which the logic of history joins the forces of
labor and the authentic experience of human life (1969: 126-127). Revolutionary
violence arising from social contradictions acquires legitimacy by the commitment
of humans in a common situation, fighting injustice and daily exploitation within
the national space, for a humanist future already being realized in the totality of
historical acts.

Neoliberal thinkers for their part reject violence as an end in itself while accepting
the brutalizing force of the market as normal and natural. Nor do they heed the cry
of victims already doomed by the structure of their situation. This is epitomized by
legal scholars who contend that primordial nationalist claims should be regulated
by autonomous international law, the domain of the metajuridique (Berman 1995).
By identifying nationalism as a primitive elemental force outside the jurisdiction of
positive law, the legal expert claims to be receptive to its experimental creativity so
that new administrative techniques can be devised to regulate the destabilization of
Europe--and, for that matter, its colonial empires--by separatist nationalisms. The
aim is to pacify the subalternized classes by juridical and culturalist prophylactic.
As I have noted above in dealing with Fanons work, the nature of violence in
the process of decolonization cannot be grasped by such dualistic metaphysics
epitomized in the binarism of passion-versus-law. What is needed is the application of
a historical materialist critique to the complex problem of national self-determination
(as already envisaged by Merleau-Ponty and others). Revolutionaries like Lenin and
Rosa Luxemburg, despite their differences, stress the combination of knowledge and
practice in analyzing the balance of political forces. They contend that class struggle
is a form of knowledge/action, the civil strife of political groups, which can synthesize
wars of position (legal, peaceful reforms) and the war of maneuver (organized frontal
assault by armed masses, to use Gramscis terminology) in the transformation of
social relations in any particular nation.
What needs to be stressed here is the philosophical underpinning of the struggle
for recognition and recovery of dignity. It invokes clearly the Hegelian paradigm
of the relation between lord and bondsman in The Phenomenology of Mind. In this
49

struggle, the possibility of violence mediates the individuals discovery of his finite
and limited existence, his vulnerability, and his need for community. Piotr Hoffmans
gloss underlines the Hegelian motif of freedom as risk: Violence is the necessary
condition of my emergence as a universal, communal beingfor I can find common
ground with the other only insofar as both of us can endure the mortal danger of the
struggle and can thus think independently of a blind attachment to our particular
selves (1989, 145). Since the nation evokes sacrifice (Renan), the warriors death on
the battlefield (Weber), honor (Sorel), self-transcendence, destiny, the state seeks to
mobilize such nation-centered feelings and emotions to legitimize itself as a wider,
more inclusive, and less artificial reality to attain its own accumulative goals. This
metaphysical speculation needs the necessary interrogation of critique (Benhabib
1986). It needs to be qualified by specifying the state as a bourgeois meta-capital
which supervises the violent domination of men by men through the private
possession of social capital (Caudwell 191971, 110).
Beyond the simplistic formulas of postcolonial thought, the nationalist struggle
for recognition impelling anticolonial revolts displays a contentious, even recalcitrant,
complexity. We also need to estimate the weight of other variables such as the
uneven development of the world system of nation-states as a whole, the interaction
of various fields of power (Bourdieus meta-capital vis--vis symbolic capital in each
formation), and the vicissitudes of the post-Cold War accumulation crisis. In any case,
whatever the moral puzzles entailed by the manifold genealogies of the nation-state,
it is clear that a dogmatic pacifism is no answer to an effective comprehension of the
real world and grass-roots intervention in it. Given the continued existence of nationstates amidst the almost unchallenged power of transnational corporations and the
bloc of rich nation-states led by the current world-hegemon (the United States), can
we choose between a just and an unjust war when nuclear weapons that can
destroy the whole planet are involved? Violence on such a scale obviously requires
the dialectical transcendence of the system of nation-states, of states administered
by historically decadent and moribund classes, in the interest of planetary justice
and survival (Meszaros 2001).

Overall, the question of violence cannot be answered within the framework

of the Realpolitik of the past but only within the framework of nation-states living
in mutual reciprocity. Causality, however, has to be ascertained and responsibility
assigned even if the nation is construed as an interpretive construct (Arnason 1990:
230). My view is that the action of the propertied classes using the various state
organs for the legalized expropriation of unpaid labor (surplus value) of millions of
people around the planet is the crux of the problem. Precisely because of corporate
globalizing, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer cogently explain, it is impossible to
conceive of the expansion and deepening involvement of multinational banks and
corporations without the prior political, military and economic intervention of the
nation-state (2001: 54). If nations have been manipulated by states dominated
by possessive/acquisitive blocs that have undertaken and continue to undertake
imperial conquests ostensibly for humanitarian goals, then the future of humanity
50

and the entire ecosystem can be insured only by eliminating those institutions and
practices that are the source of material and symbolic violence inflicted on their
citizens by these states.

To be sure, the New World Order policed by homeland patriots cannot

be changed by scholastic postcolonialism. I propose that we reappropriate the
internationalist horizon of a revolutionary Marxism which has so far been confused
with its multiple national-bureaucratic counterfeits. Michael Lowys advocacy may
help cure the intellectual pessimism that paralyzes the optimism of the will of those
fighting the relentless commodification of the planet:
Marxism has the advantage of a universalistic and critical position, in
contrast to the passions and intoxications of nationalist mythology. On
the condition, however, that this universalism does not remain abstract,
grounded on the simple negation of national particularity, but becomes a
true concrete universal (Hegel), able to incorporate, under the form of a
dialectical Aufhebung, all the richness of the particular.For Marxism, the
most important universal value is the liberation of human beings from all
forms of oppression, domination, alienation and degradation. This is a utopian
universality, in opposition to the ideological ones, which apologetically
present the Western status quo as being the accomplished universal human
culture, the end of history, the realization of the absolute spirit. Only a
critical universality of this kind, looking towards an emancipated future,
is able to overcome shortsighted nationalisms, narrow culturalisms, and
ethnocentrisms (2000: 10-11).

It is appropriate to add here Rosa Luxemburgs insistence that no nation is free

whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of another people. So
long as capitalist states exist, i.e., so long as imperialistic world policies determine
and regulate the inner and the outer life of a nation, there an be no national selfdetermination either in war or in peace (1976: 290). Within such a framework,
the nation-form, and its surrogates, can then be reconstituted and/or superseded
in order to insure that the new social arrangements will not generate opportunities
for profit-motivated state violence to recur. That revolutionary transformation will
surely render obsolete all postcolonial speculations on the withering of the nation,
much less the nation-state, in a world where transnational finance governs almost
absolutely but, we hope, not permanently.

51

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56

Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

On the Imperialist
Cultural Offensive
J. de Lima
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

57

58

A Keynote for the Commission 14 Workshop

November 14, 2015

On the Imperialist Cultural Offensive

J. de Lima
Colleagues and friends!

It is my pleasure and honor to speak on the imperialist cultural offensive before

this workshop to help set the framework for the topic Peoples Cultural Resistance
Against Imperialist Cultural Offensive.

Indeed, a long-standing war exists between imperialism and oppressed peoples in

the cultural arena. This has been ongoing ever since colonial masters realized that
swords, bayonets, guns and bombs were not enough to quell armed resistance or
wipe out entire rebel villages to effect the subjugation of a people. Since then the war
for hearts and minds have continued as conquered peoples resist their subjugation
in the cultural arena even before they themselves pick up the gun and fight back.
We are all aware that the imperialists are still the dominant force, growing ever more
sophisticated with their comprehensive so-called counterinsurgency campaigns
using bombs, bullets and deception, the latter not only against resisting peoples but
also against the people in their own heartland. On the other hand wars of resistance
produce battalions of cultural activists to buoy up the revolutionary spirit of the
fighters and the people.
While the term cultural activism has come often to mean alternative or protestoriented themes and forms in literature and the arts, the arena of cultural activism
is actually much broader. As we might have learned in our humanities and sociology
courses, culture does not only include literature and the arts, but also language
first of all, economic systems, socio-political systems, customs and traditions,
religion, and science and technology. It encompasses a wide range of systems of
thought, communication and behavior as expressed in peoples daily lives. Culture
is both material and nonmaterial and includes first of all the language and symbols
we use in communicating, our food, shelter and clothing, technological instruments
and technology, our entertainment and sports activities, our attitudes and values,
ideologies, and many more.

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Progressive social science as a whole, especially Marxist theory, ascribes a crucial

role to culture in the workings of society.

In analyzing a society and deriving its laws of motion, Marxism proceeds by studying
its economic base, then also its superstructure (politics and culture) both in their
particularity and in their interaction. The class that controls the economic base and
appropriates the surplus product is the determinant factor in the long run, producing
its own framework of political rule and dominant cultural precepts.
As Marx aptly said in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class
which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its
disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production,
so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of
mental production are subject to it. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class
and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they
do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as
producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas
of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

However, the superstructure can become crucial in intensifying contradictions within

the economic base or in breaking deadlocks towards resolution and general advance.
Thus to be a cultural activist, one must understand the underlying contradictions
and define ones class stand. On whose side are we? As cultural activists, we stand
with and for the people. We must expose and criticize oppression and obscurantism
in any or many aspects of this vast mental, communication, and behavioral complex
that we call culture, and espouse revolutionary changes in society in that very same
space.
In the past two or three decades now, the worlds countries and peoples have
been facing a renewed cultural offensive by the foremost imperialist powers. This
offensive advances in parallel with their economic and political-military offensives.
This cultural offensive is led by US imperialism. It is the soft power aspect of the US
ambition for full spectrum dominance in the economic, political, military, social and
other spheres, including outer space.
The other workshops will probably be providing the bigger context of this imperialist
ambition for full spectrum dominance and how it is expressed in the various arenas
of conflict. But in this workshop, we will focus on the themes, messages and forms of
the imperialist offensive in the cultural arena.
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Its biggest themes are emblazoned with slogans looming before us. The following are
just a few examples of such slogans, and their central messages:

Neoliberalism The owners of capital should be free to profit where, when, and
how they like, and should not be shackled but should be supported by state
laws and regulations in this regard. However, state or inter-state regulations
affecting the god of profit are anathema as they supposedly distort the
operation of the free market (read: monopolies).
Globalization National barriers are obsolete and should be smashed wherever
they still exist. Finance capital, goods and services must flow freely throughout
the globe for everyone --read: for monopoly profit-taking.
Capitalism as End of History Other countries have tried alternative systems, and
all have failed and have returned to capitalism. Capitalism may not be perfect,
but it can reform its defects. A variant of this theme is: There Is No Alternative.
People must suffer exploitation and oppression.
War on Terror All kinds of terrorists have proliferated throughout the world.
They oppose or fight the US push for neoliberalism and globalization, and
so they are enemies. Thus, it is right for the US to launch wars against them
wherever they are. It is the US global mission to invade countries, overthrow
governments, and kill people that breed or coddle the terrorists.
American Exceptionalism Americans have the right to do all of the above, because
the USA has the best democratic system in the world.
Under these central themes are a relentless stream of axioms and icons glorifying
global monopoly capitalism. These cultural themes, messages, and symbols are
constantly produced and disseminated by the most technologically powerful media
systems that the world has ever known: print, broadcast media, the internet, and
multimedia systems that encompass practically the whole world, 24/7 in real time,
and with the capacity to manufacture so-called realities that fit the goals of imperialist
domination.
Unless anti-imperialist forces, including cultural activists, develop a people-oriented
consciousness and conduct a cultural revolution by doing their own mass work
among the people to draw from, and raise awareness of their concrete needs and
interests, the insidious cultural messages of imperialism in their myriad forms can
easily spread and diffuse among them and clamp like parasites or bad habits into
their daily lives. We are all witness to this malady, as confirmed by anecdotes, case
studies, and statistics. We confront the most insidious messages of US-led cultural
imperialism:

from its crudest forms, such as McDonald diets, publicly accessible porn, fashion and
consumer whims that change from season to season, and more sophisticatedly
Starbucks and the like with their banner of corporate social responsibility so
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enticing to the intelligentsia;

to its mainstream forms, such as TV crime series and reality shows, movie
blockbusters, New York Times bestseller lists and virtual reality games that
mostly distract and misinform; and
all the way to high-level purveyors of imperialist ideology, such as the fine arts and
literary elites, top-level universities, academic journals, policy think tanks,
and new philosophical schools with outputs that pretend to being progressive
or radical but are actually mere repackaging of self-indulgent petty bourgeois
sensibilities in the service of the same rotten profit-ruled system.
All the above, including sports, movies and other forms of entertainment that take a
great deal of time to preoccupy large masses of people are used by the ruling class to
preclude criticism of the system, shut out pro-people ideas and sentiment and give
free rein to pro-imperialist and reactionary ideas and sentiments.

This cultural offensive is not simply one that is planned and implemented among the
ideological and cultural elite of US imperialism, i.e., in the CIA (Central Intelligence
Agency)-funded and big business-funded think tanks and media corporations, but
more significantly, it is wired into all the economic, political-military, and cultural/
media agencies of the US government and MNCs, and in the international bodies
where the US exercises significant influence.

Neoliberal globalization and US global military presence are intentionally designed to

drive forward this cultural offensive. Globally and especially in third world countries,
Multinational Corporations (MNCs) conduct CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
ad or cause marketing campaigns; while US special forces undertake disaster, rescue
and medical missions traditionally done by the Red Cross and charitable foundations
to deliver more strongly than the latter the subliminal propaganda messages favoring
US imperialism and its military forces embedded into seemingly humanitarian or
charitable endeavors.

Furthermore, due to global labor mobility, even overseas contract workers and poor
students on scholarships often become unwitting carriers of this cultural offensive
when they bring or send home so-called goodies of their stay abroad, underscoring
the massive influx of superior goods and lifestyles generated by global capitalism.
Let us look further at some examples of common themes and messages carried by
this imperialist cultural offensive:

Extreme individualism is justified in the name of freedom but usually in the

context of upholding the monopoly capitalist system that rewards the few at
the expense of the many. This individualism is sometimes sugar-coated with
a veneer of do-good charitable work a la Bill Gates.
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 Closely related is the dream of getting richfor example, by riding on capitalist

financial/venture schemes (thus, the many success stories of small
entrepreneurs or innovators rewarded big-time by the system), or by selling
ones artistic talents to instant stardom via Internet virality.
Consumerism, or a crass type of individualist or hedonist materialism focused on
satisfying personal wants and whims, devoid of any sense of responsibility
to the collective and long-term needs of the poor and oppressed classes and
sectors, of society at large, and of the planetary environment.
Obsession with fantasy or futuristic worlds and superheroes (in novels, movies,
TV series, comics, and digital games), mostly to lull people with dreamland
scenarios and distract them from a full and concrete understanding of realworld problems and from exploring viable solutions or alternatives to the
current rotten system.
Covert or overt racism, as packaged in elite and white-dominated lifestyles (e.g. in
fashion and fads, as reflected in advertising). Related to this is the notion of
superiority of the cultural outputs of Western imperialist countries, whether
it is a new piece of technology or research or novel. This cultural racism is
often sugar-coated with ethnic tokens (as in films and music), which represent
selected and safe icons of third world or non-elite cultures that have been
mainstreamed.
Glamorization of war, specifically on the use of high-tech weapons and individual
superpowers, prettifying imperialist domination of small and weak peoples.
Note that even in Hollywood movies that seemingly celebrate the victory of
the small, the weak, and the native who persevered in resistance (e.g. Star
Wars, Hunger Games, etc.), the victory is still due to class reconciliation after
the worst villains are defeated and overthrown.
Let us also take a closer look at the role of language. In the way this is used, especially
the terminologies and catchwords that seep down to common usage, language
serves as actual and potential packaging tools of cultural imperialism. We must be
aware and wary of pitfalls in this particular area. For example, among agencies of
the United Nations (UN), the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development), and private donor institutions a distinctive development policy
jargon has been spinned and spread to civil society Non-Government Organisations
(NGOs) and a few radical organizations. Using such jargon to engage with some
NGOs within the narrow UN development framework may have some special uses.
But simply adopting such jargons that hide the reality of exploitation, oppression
and impoverishment can trap progressives and anti-imperialist propagandists into
the UN development framework primarily serving the diminishing top one percent
of the population that continues to dominate society. A huge challenge to all antiimperialist writers and other cultural activists is to study the language of the masses
and adopt their style accordingly. In this regard, Mao Zedong had a lot to say in his
Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing.
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The imperialist cultural offensive has short-term and long-term impact on the worlds
peoples, whether in the underdeveloped third world or in the most developed
capitalist countries. This cultural offensive has become so pervasive worldwide that
even the Western bourgeois academe has come to recognize its most obvious aspects,
giving it the name cultural imperialism, the McDonaldization or globalization of
culture, and producing extensive literature to explore its many ramifications among
third world countries. Let us remember, however, that this offensive likewise impacts
on the countries and peoples of the advanced capitalist countries as well as the US
itself.
The most debilitating long-term effect of this cultural offensive is in creating
obstaclesbig and smalltowards the development of revolutionary or socialist
class consciousness among the workers and other toiling masses, and towards a
militant national and democratic consciousness among the oppressed peoples. If not
countered and eventually defeated, such cultural offensive will produce a slew of
petty-bourgeois subcultures that will numb the masses of working people.

Among other adverse effects on Third World countries, one particularly damaging
impact of the imperialist cultural offensive is in the erosion and full-scale
commercialization of local cultures in the guise of tourism. Selected and safe artifacts
of local cultures are re-packaged into commodities and icons of a so-called ethnic
but actually bourgeois-cosmopolitan culture. In the Philippines for example, young
wealthy urbanites have taken to seasonal treks to the Cordillera region to get
native tattoos, buy antique artifacts, and climbing up to sacred mountain sites in
their carloads to take selfies, without even an iota of understanding of Cordillera
indigenous peoples struggles for land and life.

Let me conclude by stating that your Commission does not deserve to be No. 14. Your
concern ought to have a much higher valuation in the hierarchy of ILPS concerns. It
directly relates to Concern #1 and suffuses all the other ILPS concerns. It may be moved
up to number 4. Marshalling the arguments to justify such a higher prioritization
may be a topic in your current workshop and the subject of an important resolution
for consideration by the assembly.
As cultural activists of the anti-imperialist movement let us take serious and
comprehensive measures to counteract the imperialist offensive on all fronts,
including measures in the cultural field that will serve as the basis of our tasks. In this
regard, let us reflect on what has been accomplished and not accomplished over the
last four years since the ILPS 4th International Assembly. While this keynote cannot
preempt the workshop discussions that should produce those measures in the form
of resolutions, may I suggest for the body to address the following concerns, which I
see as pivotal in enhancing our capability to deliver the revolutionary message to the
hundreds of millions of the masses:
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 We must train ourselves to understand and deal with facts and events, as these
unfold in the real-world conditions experienced by the masses. Let us not
confine ourselves in ivory towers, honing our individual imaginations and
crafts, away from the real world and the masses, but let us study current
events, study history, immerse ourselves with the masses in their struggles,
and in the course of our struggle develop, together with them, the peopless
culture based on concrete realities.
Let us organize among the masses. It is good that we develop our various
progressive, anti-imperialist and democratic guilds among literary and artistic
crafts or professions. But these should not result in small and exclusivist
(because self-limiting and in-bred) groups. Rather, let us must find various
ways of embedding ourselves, individually or as teams, within workers
unions, peasant associations, and other grassroots organizations of women,
youth, children, LGBTQ, and other sectors, and in the process, find ways of
developing anti-imperialist and democratic culture as a mass movement in
a real sense, instead of being the output of small and scattered collectives of
writers and artists.
Lastly, let us all contribute our utmost to a unified cultural offensive of the people
against imperialism, aware that the overwhelming dominance of imperialism
necessitates strong organizations with strong leaderships guided by the
ideology, politics and methods of a party of the most advanced and most
productive class in our society today. Especially in this age of the internet
and multimedia, let us also help build powerful counter-mediapowerful in
that they are able to support the peoples struggles and effectively amplify the
peoples voice, and in turn find resonance in and draw the concrete support
from the masses in their millions. It is not enough for us to compete with the
imperialists in such superficial terms such as trending hashtags, viral Youtube
views, and TV ratings. More important to us are the long-term results, as
measured in the sustained growth by leaps and bounds of the anti-imperialist
mass organizations and mass movement at the national level and on an
international scale. Let us help build many channels, going in one general
direction. At this point, one apt analogy is that of the peoples struggles as
many small rivulets eventually conjoining into one endless current of strength
to swamp the cultural strongholds of the enemy.
The essential task of progressive and revolutionary forces all over the world today is
developing unity, cooperation and coordination of all peoples and raising the level of
struggle against imperialism and reaction, in particular against imperialist plunder
and war led by US imperialism the No.1 terrorist power.###

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66

Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

Philosophy of the masses:

The contemporary role
of philosophy in the
Philippines
Regletto Aldrich Imbong
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

67

68

Philosophy of the masses: The contemporary

role of philosophy in the Philippines
Regletto Aldrich Imbong

Alain Badiou discusses that Philosophy is a result of four nonphilosophical
conditions: science, politics, art and love (Badiou, 2012, p. 2-3; Badiou, 2008).
Philosophy is seen as a discourse whose being wholly depends upon particular
scientific, political, artistic and amorous events that orient thought towards the New.
Philosophy ventures from the different novelties discovered and instituted within
these different conditions. Badiou cites specific examples wherein science conditioned
some of the major philosophical thought known to humanity: mathematics in the
case of Plato, Descartes and Leibniz, Physics for Kant Whitehead and Popper, History
for Hegel and Marx, and Biology for Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze (2012, p. 2).
In Badious own case, the consequences of French activism during 1968 largely
conditioned his own philosophy (Lotta et al, 2009; McGowan, 2010, p. 9). Thus, it
can be concluded that a solid foundation for philosophy is the activity of these four
nonphilosophical conditions.

In this paper, the researcher will focus on two of the four conditions that
Badiou identifies and will establish the relationship between the two conditions and
the state of philosophizing practices in the Philippines. This paper answers three
specific questions. First, what is the status of science in the Philippines and how
does this affect philosophy? Second, can local politics condition philosophizing in the
Philippines? Third, what political tradition in the Philippines suits the Universalist
categories of philosophy? Lastly, what should be Philosophys nature in the
Philippines based on the statuses of these two conditions? The paper will be divided
into five parts. After the introduction, the researcher will give a brief evaluation of
the status of science in the Philippines. Next is a discussion of Badious politics of
emancipation as the bearer of the New. This will be followed by how the genuine Left
movement participates in the type of politics expounded by Badiou. The last part
is a recommendation as to what the nature of philosophy in the Philippines must
necessarily be in response to the scientific and political conditions of the time.
Science, Philippine Society and Philosophy

The progress of science and technology is crucial to the survival and
development of any society. At stake in this scientific progress is the betterment of
life (both biological and social) in general and the economy in particular. It is safe to
say that countries which have experienced scientific progress are also the countries
that have national industries that sustain an independent and progressive economy.
69

Parallel to this material or economic progress that science brings is the development
of thought within the specific society. Scientific progress aids in both the material
and formal development of any society and hence it is necessary to place great
importance upon it. As Bruce Alberts (2010) opines, over the long run, any nation
that makes crucial decisions while ignoring science is doomed.

In the Philippines, science remains poor and laggard. This state of science
can be explained by citing some indicators which the Philippines falls short of
achieving. Posadas (2009) cites five of the most important international indicators
that objectively measure science and technology capability of a country. His work
elaborates on how science and technology in the Philippines fails to meet these
international indicators. The first three indicators are called input indicators, and the
last two output indicators (p. 134). The researcher will focus on the first two input
indicators as these are government-aided conditions and the researcher contends
that the government is the primary entity decisive in promoting the advancement of
science.

The first indicator is the countrys number of full-time (FTE) researchers per
million population. Posadas cites UNESCO, which claims that the Philippines only
has 81 FTE per million of its population, a number way below the target of 380 for
developing countries like the Philippines. It is also noted in the study that, despite the
increase in population in the country, the number of FTEs hardly increased and even
dropped within the period from 1995-2005 (Posadas 2009, p. 134). This deplorable
condition is affirmed by a more recent statement by Sen. Ralph Recto who revealed
that there are only 78 FTE per million Filipinos (Usman, 2014).

The second indicator is the gross expenditures on R&D (GERD) as a
percentage of GDP. Citing UNESCO again, Posadas exposes that the Philippines failed
to meet the UN benchmark of 0.5 percent of GDP for GERD as it only allocated 0.12
percent (2009, p. 134). In relation to this insufficient state subsidy for science and
technology, progressive Filipino scientists also revealed that the 2014 budget for the
Department of Science and Technology (DOST) was only 0.53 percent of the total
budget (Salamat, 2013). This is far below par with the mandates of the Organization
of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which asks countries to allocate
2.25 percent of the annual budget for science and technology.

Philippine technological capability is further crippled as a result of an
economic ideology guided by a market-pull approach which essentially is restrictive
of technological progress in developing countries. According to Posadas, the
market-pull approach is guided by two neoliberal agenda. First is the Principle
of Comparative Advantage, which holds that a firm, industry, or country should
specialize on production technologies and systems that can make maximum use
of its current endowments or its comparative advantage. Second is neoliberalism
or the Washington Consensus, which calls for free trade, free enterprise, free
markets, FDI liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and minimal government
intervention in the market (2009, p. 143). These agenda have serious implications
and consequences on our nations technological and industrial development as we
are now restricted from developing our technological capacities and tied to remain
dependent on imported machineries and technologies. In contrast with the import70

oriented agenda of the Philippines, industrializing countries like South Korea, Taiwan
and China deliberately defied the principles of comparative advantage to create
globally competitive industries... (Posadas, 2009, p. 144). For Posadas, this leads
to a vicious cycle of science and technology underdevelopment and dependence, a
problem that haunts and continues to persist in the Philippines.

This problematic condition of science in the Philippines produces two
consequences. On the one hand is the absence of a strong national industry anchored
on the proper and effective utilization of its agrarian sector. On the other hand
and this is of more interest to philosophy is the lack of active conditions for the
prospering of philosophy. Because of the latter, philosophy in the Philippines falls
short of finding a scientific condition for the emergence of discourses on par with
those of Plato, Leibniz, Nietzsche and Marx. Badiou (2012) explicitly points out that
the future of philosophy depends on its capacity for progressive adaptation to the
changing of its conditions (p. 3) and this is precisely why the philosopher describes
philosophy and philosophizing as an aftermath it captures the truths that burst
out from scientific, political, artistic and amorous novelties. Philosophy is because of
the New.
Thus, philosophys relationship with social conditions is one of seizure
(Badiou, 2008, p.13; Badiou, 2005b, p. 52-53). Philosophy establishes its place by
borrowing the truths produced, say, from a scientific novelty. Inversely, the lack of any
scientific progress endangers philosophy and philosophizing. Philosophy could not
establish itself as a place of thought if scientific thought itself fails to provide truth(s)
for philosophy. There is, in the Philippine context, nothing scientifically New yet.
But does this spell the demise if not impossibility of philosophy in the Philippines?
Philosophy could not yet rely on the state of science here in the Philippines, but this
does not mean philosophys defeat. Philosophy must never take the defeatist stand
that simply envisions its own end. On the contrary, philosophy must take further
steps (Badiou, 1999, p.32). In the absence of scientific activity, philosophy in the
Philippines must orient itself towards a more active condition that can nevertheless
envision the New: politics.
Emancipation Politics and the New

The authenticity of a political sequence is measured by its fidelity to the
construction of the New, of that which is not in the order of the Old and hence
establishes itself as a force that negates that which is. This essentially is a politics
of emancipation and it draws itself from the void that an event brings forth as the
latent inconsistency of the given world (Badiou, 2008, p 152).

Emancipation politics is conditioned by an Event. An Event is an indiscernible
point in a given situation which marks the point of excess that defies the very limits
set by that situation (McGowan, 2010, p. 9). It is a singularity that ruptures the
situation and orients practice and thought towards the New. The situation is always
characterized by that which is: the normal, stable, and natural. Being is that which is
71

natural and that-which-is-not-being is the non-natural (Badiou, 2005a, p. 173). And

since the Event is that-which-is-not-being (Badiou, 199, p. 105), Being prohibits the
Event (Ibid., p. 184-190). The Natural will not give way to the Historical. Expressed in
more political terms, the State is hell-bent in preserving that which is and represses
any attempt or even the mere envisioning of the New.
It is important to emphasize that the State determines that which is normal,
stable and natural, and this is done primarily through the laws, courts, prisons, the
police and media. But since an Event is the other-than-being and every genuine political
sequence is conditioned by it, emancipation politics is a sequence of the abnormal,
the unstable, the antinatural (Badiou, 2005a, p.174) a force that contradicts the
being of the situation sanctified by the State. It is a movement which breaks away
from the logic and law of the State and prescribes a measure to the measurelessness
of the State through the suddenly emergent materiality of a universalizable collective
(Badiou, 2005b, 146-147).

Since Being prohibits the Event, an illegal choice necessary for the procedure
of the New must be made. It is in this regard that the intervention of a political subject
faithful to the Event must proceed (Badiou, 2005b, p. 202-211). Point by point, a
political subject organizes the New even while being immersed in the Old order.
Naturally, the state becomes repressive if not violent as an alien language, thought
and politics is introduced to it. Weber asserts a solid point in saying that only the
State has the monopoly of the use of legitimate violence or force. Quoting Trotsky,
Weber reiterates that every state is based on force (2004, p. 33). Hence, as Lenin
(1974) opined, the State must utilize all the coercive apparatuses for normality and
stability to be (p. 393-396). It is in this regard that the Evental rupture has a violent
quality (McGowan, 2010, p. 8) since the State, as the State of the ruling class (Badiou,
2005a, p. 105), is determined to use force against any Evental or historical rupture.
Emancipation politics is a violent rupture of a collective determined to organize the
New.
The collective is the truth of politics (Badiou, 2005b, p. 97). Historical
novelties happen not by a powerful persuasive language of an individual, nor by a
divine intervention of the One, but by the organized, disciplined and militant action
of the collective. In relation to Philippine history, Constantino (1975) reminds us that
the radical Newness brought about by the 1896 Revolution was not a product of a
single powerful individual persuading the Spanish state but by the collective force of
the masses organizing the New (p. 167-168). Politics bears with it a truth and it is
the truth of the collective presenting itself as the makers of history, the bearers of the
New. It is in this context that Badiou contends that politics is rare since a collective
organizing the New only shines at the rarest moments of history.

The collective, determined to organize the New, places equality as its axiom
(Badiou, 2005b, p. 99). The State, as constituted by the effective placement of
classes, is the negation to the maxim of equality; in fact, the State favors the notion of
freedom rather over and above that of equality. Hence, the State reaches its epitome
through the establishment of the bourgeois State whose dynamics revolve around
the effective employment of the notion of liberty: free trade, free competition,
liberalization, freedom to amass surplus labor and profit, etc. The collective on the
72

other hand, guided by the general will, recognizes that equality is far more important
than liberty (Rousseau,1994 p. 86-87; Badiou, 2012, p. 31; Badiou, 2005b, 97) as
particular interests must give way to the collective and universal interests.

What this discourse on emancipation politics so far revealed is politics capacity

to touch onto truth: a category which philosophy preoccupies itself with. Here is an
affirmative political position that contradicts the vulgar bourgeois rhetorical claim
that linguistic differences and opinions, rather than truth, command the operation of
a politics. On the contrary, emancipation politics recognizes that politics is always a
contradiction and the truth of this contradiction is that it commands difference and
not the other way around (Badiou, 2009, p. 10). Difference, politically expressed in
the struggle of and among classes, is the condition of the State. What this implies
is the States incapacity to discern and organize something which has a universal
value since it is always the state of the ruling particular class. Something is only in
the order of universality if it goes beyond established differences and that these
differences become indifferent (Badiou, n.d.). In placing primacy on universality and
equality, emancipation politics organizes a political truth whose centrality is the
disappearance of the space of the placement of classes (Badiou, 2009, p. 7), i.e., the
State. Lenin (1964) famously described this as the abolition and withering away
of the state , (p. 400). In this way, emancipation politics becomes compatible with
philosophy when the former obeys the philosophical principle of the subordination
of the variety of opinions to the universality of truth (Badiou, 2012, p. 29).

Badiou explains that a politics touches on truth provided that it is founded

upon the egalitarian principle of a capacity to discern the just, or the good (2005b,
p. 98). The classical name for this is justice. Justice, far from respecting and preserving
differences and particularities, is the examination of any situation from the point of
view of an egalitarian norm vindicated as universal (Badiou, 2012, p. 29). The truth
of politics is the truth of the collective protractedly organizing the New whose norm
and axiom is equality and universality. The category of the universal is not new, as
it has already been expounded by the Greek thinkers. To distinguish and clarify this
Badiouian concept of universality from that of the classical philosophers conception,
Badiou clarifies that his
...conception is...a creative one. Universalism is always
the result of a great process that opens with an event.
To create something universal is to go beyond evident
differences and separations. This is, in my conviction, the
great difference between my conception of universality...
and some traditional conceptions of universality. It is
also the difference between a grammatical conception
of truth and my conception of truth as a creation, a
process, an event.

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The Radical Philippine Left as the Bearer of the New

The fundamental difference between science and politics in the Philippines
can be seen in their respective degrees of activity and influence to society. Within
the period from the 1860s to the present, scientific advancements, if any, have not
so far made a radical push of Philippine society toward the New as compared to
politics. It is on this general note that the researcher argues that politics is a better
condition for philosophizing in the Philippines because, in the rarest periods of our
history, politics had borne the New. But the political landscape of the Philippines is
broad and hence, this paper, guided by Badiouian emancipation politics, singles out
a particular political movement which, tested by the harshness and brutality of the
State, is unwaveringly determined to organize the New: the radical Left movement.

It needs to be reiterated that the radical Philippine Left (RPL) movement
today is a resumption and continuation of the unfinished 1896 Revolution (Sison,
1964). Both trace their roots to a single political event: the Cry of Pugadlawin. What
essentially binds the two together is their determined stand to end foreign rule and
to establish a genuinely independent society. However, learning from the 1896 EDSA
Revolutions lack of a strong ideological, political and organizational framework, and
from the RPLs major ideological, political and organizational errors for which it had
to undergo two great rectification movements, the current RPL believes that it has
assumed a better standpoint, viewpoint and method in waging prolonged political
struggle.

Essentially, the RPLs politics ruptures the established dominant order. It is
sharp in analyzing Philippine society to be semi-colonial and semi-feudal, brought
about by the symbiotic relationship of the three basic problems of US Imperialism,
Feudalism and Bureaucrat Capitalism (Guerrero, 2005, p. 63-65; see also Sison,
2009, p. 26-28). It acknowledges that the symbolic expression of Philippine society
is the social pyramid in which the top 1% comprised of the landed and big bourgeois
classes dominate and exploit the base 99% comprised of the diverse classes of the
middle and petty bourgeoisie, the workers, and the peasants (Guerrero, 2005, p.
132-152). Guided by an ideology tested by social practice, the RPL recognizes that
the state is but an entity ready to defend the interests of the ruling class through the
use of coercive state apparatuses and therefore resolves that the primary means to
rupture the state is by creating an army capable of serving the exploited instead
of the exploiters (Lenin, 1964, p. 393, 395) while at the same time maximizing the
democratic spaces and institutions set forth by the dominant order (Sison, 2009,
p. 36-37). For more than four decades of both armed and unarmed resistance, the
RPL has steadfastly committed itself to this noble cause, accumulating more strength
than ever before and now ready to step into a new stage of political struggle (CPP
Central Committee, 2014).

The RPL protractedly organizes the New even while the Old remains
dominantly powerful. As Guerrero (2005) remarks, in advancing towards the
peoples democratic state system, revolutionary bases must be developed in order
to establish the independent regime even while the comprador-landlord-bureaucrat
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state has not yet been completely overthrown in the country (p. 162). In this way,
wave by wave, a New system based on equality is practiced in the archipelago.
Equality, then, can and must be understood as a notion that remains indiscernible
within the Old comprador-landlord-bureaucrat dictatorship but which continues
to be the maxim of thought and action of the united front of peasants, workers,
professionals, local entrepreneurs, etc. the political collective whose interests, far
from serving foreign and local oligarchic powers, are consistent with and serve the
general will.
Philosophy and the Radical Philippine Left

Having laid down the current conditions of the emancipation politics organized
by the RPL, the researcher shall present three points relative to the question of
philosophys role and mission in the Philippines today. First, philosophy must
integrate the radical struggle of the RPL. This means breaking down the confines set
by the often conservative University and the paralyzing atmosphere of coffee shops
and other bourgeois spheres of intellectual practices, so that philosophizing be done
at the grassroots level: the struggling masses. The degree of integration may vary
as political consciousnesses also differ. But what ties these involvements together
is the unity of discourses that are critical against the dominant order that favours
partiality rather than universality and equality through the effective employment of
classes. Second, while integrating the material conditions of existence, philosophy
cannot stop being an abstract speculative practice, yet at the same time, philosopizing
in the Philippines becomes more substantial if thoughts are loaded with the most
revolutionary content, and more systematic if philosophical reflections are guided
with emancipating categories. Integrating with the movement that bears the New,
a whole new discourse capable of articulating the New becomes possible. After all,
philosophy is the act of reorganizing all the theoretical and practical experiments by
proposing a great new normative division, which inverts an established intellectual
order and promotes new values beyond the commonly accepted ones (Badiou,
2012, p. 13). Lastly, philosophy must spring from immersive ventures with the
masses and the radical movement to test the validity of its own discourses, while
assuming a self-critical stance in order to rectify its discourse and attune it to the
changing conditions. From these three points, philosophizing in the Philippines must
be guided by the dialectics of integration, articulation and praxis, at the service of the
struggling masses and the movement of the New.

75

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78

Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

A Critique of the Proposed

Amendments in the
Philippine Constitution
Edberto M. Villegas
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

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A Critique of the Proposed Amendments in the

Philippine Constitution
Edberto M. Villegas
Some of our politicians are at their old game again, attempting to amend
certain sections of the Constitution, specifically its economic provisions in Article
12. To accomplish this, they are resorting to the easier approach of a congressional
initiative, which requires vote of Congress for any charter change which would
then be presented to the people in a plebiscite for approval , instead of calling for
a constitutional convention that may include the election of non-politicians. These
politicians claim that it is the economic sections in the Constitution that they are
interested in, but some sectors are suspicious that this is a just a clever maneuver
to change the political system of the Philippines, as provided for in the Constitution.
In fact, the Belmonte bill to amend the constitution also includes changes in the
ownerships of educational institutions and in media and advertising as contained in
Sec. 4 and 12 of Article 14 on education and in Sec. 11(1 and 2), Art. 16 on media and
advertising.
Though this latest attempt to foist their agenda on the Filipino people did
not succeed with the adjourning of the lower house of Congress last June 8, without
debating on the proposed amendments of the Constitution, it is important to make
the Filipino people aware of what some of our legislators are up to, in connivance
with some business interests, particularly foreign. They plan to revive their attempt
to tinker with the Constitution when Congress goes on session again.
The Belmonte bill or Resolution No. RB 10001

The proposed House bill with Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. its main sponsor
seeks to add the phrase unless provided by law to lift constitutional restrictions on
the participation of foreigners in the following economic domains as stated in the
1987 Constitution : Sec. 2, Article 12, on exploration, development and utilization of
natural resources; Sec. 3, Art. 12, on the acquisition of lands of the public domain,
including agricultural, forest or timber, mineral lands and national park; Sec. 7, Art
12, on conveyance or transfer of private lands; Sec. 10, Art. 12, on investment in
business undertakings, and; Sec. 11, Art. 12, on grant of franchise, certificates or any
other forms of authorization for the operation of public utilities. The proposed bill
will remove the prohibition for foreigners to own lands both in the public and private
domains and allow them to participate in business activities in the Philippines up to
100% ownership from the present 30% to 40% restrictions. The 1987 Constitution
states that all public lands cannot be alienated (transfer the possession of to some
individuals or groups), except agricultural, and the latter are reserved for Filipino
citizens, for instance, acquiring parcels of public lands under the land reform
program. Foreigners are likewise excluded from owning private lands and these
cannot be conveyed or transferred to them (Sec. 7, Art. 12) even through inheritance,
81

for example, if a person acquired foreign citizenship even though his parents are
Filipinos.
The Belmonte bill would open the door for 100% ownership of lands, both
public and private, to foreign nationals. This would then allow them to exploit the
abundant natural resources of the Philippines (one of the richest in the world,
according to the World Bank, for example, the Philippines is no. 3 in gold deposits
globally, 4th for copper deposits and 5th for nickel). In Southeast Asia, the Philippines
have the greatest number of proven deposits of metallic and non-metallic minerals
both on land and in the sea, the latter craves for by an aggressive China.
The right of foreigners to extract our countrys natural wealth, if the
constitutional amendments were approved, would go beyond those provided by the
Mining Act of 1995, which has been suspended regarding the giving of new mining
permits due to the wanton abuses of some foreign companies in exploiting the natural
resources of our country, destroying the environment in the process(of course, it is
not their land). In this regard, a team of Filipino scientists and engineers led by Dr.
Herman D. Mendoza from the Department of Mining, Metallurgy and Materials of the
University of the Philippines (UP) have developed a technology to extract gold at the
same time copper from ores twice as much as our small-scale miners can do. And the
method is also environment-friendly which even surpassed European standards. And
they did in on a meagre grant of less than P30 million from the DOST, the first project
that this agency has extended to the state university after a hiatus of 20 years.
Other Social Consequences of Foreigners
Owning Lands in the Philippines

Through buying lands, foreigners can engage in land speculation, which was
the immediate cause of the 2008 stock market crash in the United States, sparked
by unbridled speculative activities in land value, creating a financial bubble that
eventually burst. At present, the US economy has not fully recovered from the
2008 financial crisis. If such an event happens in the Philippines, it would be more
devastating for a weak economy like ours, which heavily depends on external funding.
Allowing foreigners to own lands will also pose a threat to our national security.
The weak Philippine government may lost control of its national territories with
private corporations and individuals going into a selling spree to gain high profits
from land-hungry foreigners. How could it be prevented then if some unscrupulous
groups (even sanctioned by a government, most probably the US or China) would
build secret bases on their acquired lands and prohibit trespassers from sticking
their noses into what they consider their private properties? It is for this primary
reason that Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia (nearer to our shores and also
developing countries) and Mexico prohibit foreigners from owning lands in their
territories.

Other social consequences with foreigners being allowed to own lands in the
country, including agricultural, would be its adverse impact on local food production
and the disruption of the cultures of indigenous peoples. This is because foreign
interests may convert agricultural lands to subdivisions, build condos, hotels, malls,
golf courses on them to jack up their values, displacing inhabitants on these lands,
most probably, farmers. As it is now, many agricultural lands have been converted
into subdivisions and industrial estates by their owners to evade land reform and
82

this phenomenon may get worse if the prohibition for foreigners to own land in the
Philippines were removed in the constitution. In some states in the US and Canada,
which allow foreign ownership of lands as the economies of these countries are
securely in the hands of their nationals compared to Third World countries, farm
lands cannot be bought by foreigners. (Hodgson, et. al, FAO Legal Papers, Dec. 1999)
The way of life of indigenous peoples occupying lands sold to foreigners will also be
disrupted as the provision on the right to ancestral domain provided in Art. 12 will
also be amended.
Foreign Participation in Local Business

Sections 10 and 12 in Article 12(or On the National Economy and Patrimony)
will likewise be amended to invite 100% foreign participation in business undertakings
in the Philippines, beyond the present 40% limit.( It is to be noted that Vietnam only
allows 15% foreign shares in any business endeavor in this country.) As it is now, the
40% restriction for foreign shares in local companies has been easily skirted around
by Congress, which allows Nestle Phil and Coca Cola, Phil.., for example, to have
100% foreign ownership. What foreign lobbyists in Congress want is to eliminate
all together the provision of 40% ownership of economic establishments, including
in the grant of franchise to public utilities, so that they will not be pestered anymore
by any possible petitions in our courts by concerned Filipino citizens worried about
foreigners taking full control of a local business activity.

With the removal of the restriction of 40% ownership of business entities,
foreign nationals, particularly from the US, could further entrench their hold on
our local economy. Since our colonial period under the US and up to the grant of
Parity Rights to Americans which ended in 1974, US transnational corporations
have tightened their grip on our economy. At present, US companies are dominant in
manufacturing and the service sectors, either through special exemptions from the
40% restriction or through joint-venture agreements and the grant of franchises, like,
for instance, Benguet Corporation, the largest gold mining company in Asia, Caltex,
Shell(in partnership with Dutch interest), Pure Foods(under the franchise of Hormel,
USA), Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, Macdonald(franchise held by George Yang), Wendys,
KFC, Intel, AMD telecommunication equipment, Walmart, Procter and Gamble,
Franklin Baker Co.(engaged in coconut refining), Del Monte, Ford, CNN, etc., etc. The
US economic presence is followed by the Japanese, the latter mostly in car assembly,
Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and in home appliances, Sony, Hitachi, Panasonic, etc.
The Japanese big firms or kigyo-shudans have come in droves to the Philippines ever
since the Marcos regime ratified the Philippine-Japan Treaty of Amity, Commerce
and Navigation in 1974. The US and Japan likewise control the export business in
the Philippines in electronic materials, located in our so-called free trade zones
and which produce micro-chips and other parts of telecommunication equipment.
The Philippine government boasts of a high export earnings of IT equipment, our
no. 1 export product, but the enterprises churning out these materials are foreign
companies, some of them 100% owned by them. The irony is that the inputs for
these export products are mostly imported, that is the export activities of foreign
firms have not much backward linkages to our domestic economy.

Further, opening our door wider to foreign investment may just entice more
short-term portfolio or speculative investment (otherwise known as hot money)
83

to come into the Philippines. At present, 50% or more of foreign investment in the
country are portfolio, which can be withdrawn at the whim of the investors who
are scouring around the world for quick and high profits from earnings in stocks,
bonds, and other forms of securities. A sudden withdrawal of hot money can
cause a hemorrhage in the financial system of the host country like what transpired
in 2013 and 2014 when $441.56 million and $2.051 billion, respectively, were
suddenly divested from the Philippine money market, most of them going back
to the US.(BSP) This is also what happened during the 1997 Asian financial crisis
(sparked by massive land speculation in Thailand), when $7 billion were withdrawn
in July 1997 from the Philippines leading to the closures of many firms, mostly SMEs,
laying off 120, 673 workers. (DOLE, 1998) Portfolio investment is the favorite tool
of big time speculators like the American billionaire George Sorros of the Sorros
Fund Management in playing with the economies of nations to make tremendous
profits specially through short-selling in the stock market. (Sorros was accused by
then Malaysian prime minister Mohamad Mahathir of causing economic havoc in
his country through speculative investment during the Asian 1997 financial crisis.)
Thus, trusting on portfolio investment, specially if it is unregulated, is a very risky
way to goad GNP growth as it is done by the Philippine government
Employment in SMEs and micro enterprises
compared to the large firms

Some quarters claim that with more foreign investment, which to them will
increase if the 40% restriction were removed, flowing into the Philippines, the
persistent unemployment problem of the Philippines(25 to 30% of the labor force
from 2002-2012 based on National Statistics Office, NSO, data) will be significantly
reduced. It is to be reminded these champions of foreign investments that foreign
firms, mostly concentrated in manufacturing and in services, which are in the category
of large firms based on NSO statistics, only employ at most 8% of the labor force
of the Philippines. Most of the employed are in the micro and small and medium
enterprises (SMEs), mostly owned by Filipinos, which absorb 65% on the average of
local employment, for instance, from the period 1995 to 2009. (Aldaba, PIDS, April,
2011) The remaining 35% were employed in the large firms but not all of them are
fully-owned by or are joint-ventures or have franchises with foreigners. The sad
part is that the micro and SMEs experienced great difficulties in obtaining loans from
local banks and government sources due to lack of collaterals and inadequate capital.
The big companies, on the other hand, easily obtain loans, sometimes even without
any collateral as their business names are deemed sufficiently trustworthy.

While it is true that in terms of value-added or productivity, it is the large
firms that outdo the micro and SMEs in the manufacturing sector (77% vs. 23% from
1994 to 2006, Aldaba, Ibid.)
, this is no reflection at
all that the welfare of their workers are improving since a great portion of this valueadded accrues as profits and interests earned by the big firms. The large firms have
higher productivity because of the use of more modern machineries and technology,


According to the Philippine National Statistics Office(NSO) definitions, a
micro enterprise has 1-9 employees, a small enterprise has 10-99 employees, a medium
enterprise has 100-199 employees and a large enterprise has 200 or more employees.

84

which however leads to the rationalization of work, reducing the number of

workers in the firms. It is the large enterprises more than the SMEs that also resort
to contractualization and sub-contracting to save on labor costs. Filipino workers in
Metro Manila, where around 60% of the countrys labor force are located, receive a
low $240 per month wage, compared to Indonesian workers, $253/mo., Thai $369/
mo. and Chinese, $403/mo.(Wallace, Inquirer, June 18, 2015). Some groups would
even aim to control the rise of wages of Filipinos to attract more foreign investment.
What can we say?
Amidst all the foreign investment coming into the county, the Filipino people
continue to remain in dire poverty. The Social Weather Station (SWS) has come out
with its latest survey on the number of poor people in the Philippines in the first
quarter of 2015 that shows that 51%(11.4 million) families rated themselves as
poor. (SWS, Statistics for Advocacy) If we take the average size of the Filipino family
placed at five, 11.4 million translate to 57 million people which is 55% of our total
population of 103 million. Contrast this with government statistics which shows
only 25.8% of Filipinos as living below the poverty line in 2014.(NSCB). In Indonesia ,
12.4% of the population are deemed poor based on official statistics and in Thailand,
it is 8.1%.(From Jakarta Post, Feb. 13, 2011 and Index, mundi. Internet). This is to
remind the Aquino government that merely relying on GDP(gross domestic product)
growth, based on value-added, which it boasts is the highest in Southeast Asia at
6%, is no assurance at all of the advance of the welfare of the Filipino masses. In fact,
it only manifests that the rich are getting richer. The increasing number of street
children roaming the streets of Metro Manila, amidst its posh malls and tall buildings,
is a stark testimony that the development policies of our economic planners are not
on the right road.
Amendments on the Ownerships of Schools
and in media and advertising

Now, let us turn to Sec. 4 and 12, Art. 14 and Sec. 11(1 and2) , Art. 16, which
the Belmonte bill would want likewise to eliminate the restrictions on foreign
investment. Sec. 4 and 12, Art. 14 , on Education, reserves the right to establish
educational institutions to Filipino citizens, but the Belmonte bill will enable
foreigners to put up their own schools in the country. Sec. 11(1 ) and (2) Art. 16,
prohibits any foreign participation in the ownership and management in local media
(yet there is CNN Philippines now) and allows only 30% foreign shares but not
management in advertising. The Belmonte bill will remove these limitations and allow
100% foreign ownership and management both in media and advertising. Pray,
what would happen to our educational system with the possibility of foreigners with
their superior capital dominating it and making their own curricula? What would
happen to our local media and advertising with foreigners, particularly American,
dictating their tenor with their cultural biases? Soon, the colonial mentality of many
Filipinos, specially among the higher and middle classes, may just be enhanced with
all kinds of foreign habits and preferences disseminated in schools, the mass media
and advertising, threatening the Filipino cultural identity, which is supposed to be


Rationalization of work is of course from the perspective of the capitalist and
is a misnomer from the point- of- view of the workers, because it leads on the other hand
to their pauperization.
85

a task of the government to build. A result of all these possible onslaughts on our
national identity(which is already weak as it is now) may be more and more Filipinos
embarrassed to speak their own language and wanting to be artificially white in skin
and their noses elongated in imitation of Westerners.

Finally, we should take lesson from the Bedouin tale of the master and his
camel. One freezing night, the camel requests its master if it could bring its nose
inside the latters tent to which the master obliges. In the middle of the night, the
master was awakened by the camels movement. The camel has inserted its head
and long neck inside the tent, and seeing its master awake, asks further if it could
place its forelegs inside as well. The master agreed to which the camel, summoning
enough confidence, requests if it could just stand inside the tent. The master shifted
his position to allow the camel to come inside, but because of the smallness of the
tent was pushed outside. It is freezing cold outside, the master complains to which
the camel replies Sorry, there is no more room for you inside.

.

***

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Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

In the Defence of the

Actuality of Communism:
Why you shouldnt be
afraid of it
Jasmine Ado
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

89

90

In the Defence of the Actuality of Communism:

Why you shouldnt be afraid of it
Jasmin Ado
Communism is the solution of the riddle of history,
and knows itself to be the solution
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844

Capitalism is indeed a difficult task to break out; we are confined in this

market-and-state framework and there is no quick formula at hand indeed but to
say that we should no longer challenge Capitalism because it evolves every now and
then as it thrives in series of crises is the death of a discourse and is nothing but a
mere nave theory, its like you are saying that we should just simply let rape happen
because we cant struggle through it so well just end up enjoying rape! Like the bible,
its easy to cherry-pick in Das Kapital, the Communist Manifesto and all other works
of Karl Marx to have him misinterpreted that he is only enviously worshipping the
bourgeoisie because they have all the wines and music and that the proletariats have
none, that there is power in capitalism to break down and dissolve feudal, patriarchal
or idyllic bonds and hierarchies, that all that is solid melts in to air, his discourses
didnt stopped in there, he never dreamed to be an oppressor someday, to tell that
Marx is actually praising capitalism is a kind of Straw Man logical fallacy and I
hope that he doesnt roll in his grave every single time he is misinterpreted. Enough
with this bull-crap bourgeois revisionism, All of the legacies of heroes/philosopherkings-who-did-not-come-to-be who have withered, fallen and sacrificed their lives
for us with their philosophy then the dreams that theyve dreamed of what theyve
envisioned in the future will be in vain, without their pain, death and sacrifice, all
of us will have nothing. Capitalism only survives because we let it be and therell be
only hell in Capitalism as long as we put monetization in the centre of our lives. It
only dehumanizes and destroys humanity because it only alienates and estranges
each and every one of us and even the capitalist themselves cant escape from it.
You only dare question the actuality of communism because you are afraid of
its critical and historical slippages then youll dare tell us that we just have read too
many Maoist and Leninist articles. When scientists fail from their experiments, they
go back from their boards and look where theyve gone wrong then try again and
that would also apply to the likes of us sociologists. The Great Leap Forward is a
failure? Then better make a Better and Greater Leap Forward Stupid. Never silence
the dialogue between memory and history, between personal troubles and societys
issues, or is it because you are politically-obsolete and sheltered with your personal
wealth of the American Dream and you are not used to facing a head-on violence
from the fascist police with all their helmets, rattan sticks, rotten shields and bullet
vests with fire trucks on the side while youre unfaithful on the other side because
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they only have nothing but themselves as the wretched of the earth and their fists? Is
it because the modern concealed and structured violence that is comforting because
you dont get to see them at first sight? Is it because you see the proletarian power
unethical and the social-policing and state-structured violence ethical? Is it because
you are afraid of hurt, defeat and the stigma, the deviance of what it is like to be
an activist who is bravely fighting for their ideals? Is it because you are afraid that
all of your efforts are just being wasted because you want quick results and not in
an endless cycle of hope and disappointment? Is it because you only wanted a blindand-justified and subservient normal cerebral-wrecking, judgement-dimming life
of an ass wiper that doesnt want to get into trouble for your own damn good?
Indeed, Capitalism must have gotten all of us insecure and heavily specialized
expendables but you must really be a morally-bankrupt, metaphysically-backslidinga,
pseudo-enlightened, damned life-hater with an un-aestheticized life, an untermensch
that allows nothing to happen. Why are you so proud of your imbecility? The three
quarters of humanitys denied humanity and their unsatisfied needs does not simply
go down the drain, the idea of communism is never pass for it is not the ideal
which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is the only practical movement of
all the common struggles of living labour in communitarian form to recuperate is
expropriated capacities.
Like Antigone, the very moment that you say NO! is the very day that youll
die, you may say that she has only experienced life as a tragic heroine but in that
way; she had faced and created an action against her attempt to the non-existence of
the Big Other with her ignited great, divine spirit indeed, fuelling the first pommel
of fire, the first strum to the string ensembles of all desires and impulses of class
struggles is never easy to start to exceed to the actuality of the destiny of the left.
Antigone has suspended the rules that the government of Creon accepts as a social
reality, she then drives the radical incompleteness of this reality. She accepted the
double impossibility, whether it is to bury her brother or not, whether she breaks the
rules or not, whether she lives or not. Although our empirical universe is incomplete,
this does not mean that there is another alternative true reality that sustains it.
She has accepted that there is no other place, that there is no other place for home
and comfort, only the Now, that the existence of the big other is only an illusion. The
eternity descending in time kind of divine violence and thirst for proletarian victory,
your death will never be in vain, she died a symbolic death for she was the first to
attempt of overcoming the inconsistency and the incompleteness, the ontological
destituteness of our universe.
The true courage of an act is to accept the inexistence of no other place and no
big other in order to attack the existing other. The truth cannot be faced by everyone
for it is awfully ugly, the truth is not for the weak but it is capable to make us as
stronger beings. The truth is we all want the same then we end up as nothing, you
were only hindered and told by the norms to live in endless bondage of life is your
career after you run into meritocratic diploma mills then dive into thoughtless
consumption where things you own end up owning you. Then later on, you will
create duplicates of your own trashed, crapped-up and sugar-coated miserable life
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then tell them to follow your cowardly roots then die without scars and have nothing
but a beautiful stock body without battle scars then Id say What a waste. You will
lay dying beside all the useless shit youve begged, bought and worked hard for all
of your life as an attempt to impress the world. You will die without realizing your
actual human potential and will to power; you will die a slave not knowing that you
were. You will die without realizing that your loyalty to your employer is not because
they love you but they only love you for your cheap and profitable labour-power for
their own wider gains of profit margin. You will die not knowing you actually have
chains like the rest of us. All that is dead rotten goes down the drain and the saddest
thing is that you are going down alive; you will never realize that you were never
alive, that history has no place for egocentric, self-absorbed and coward yuppies and
millennials like you are who is passionate to imitate the leisure class. All of us are in
chains, the only shame is not to break and lose it.
We are supposed to be a class of strong and intellectual young men and
women, we want to give our lives into something as most of us ended up going out for
work, only for work and coming back home every single day confined and embracing
complacency while chasing cars, clothes, condominiums and other shit that wed dont
need with our minimum wages with the jobs that we all equally hate. Inequality and
oppression begins with mis-education, this is a structural violence that most of us
with myopic eyes cannot see the great war of our generation. Supposedly, our lives
should be better than this. We are not born in this world to wipe and lick the asses
of the bourgeoisie, they are meant to be destroyed. The first step to emancipation is
naming your enemy/ies; neo-liberalism, globalization has already penetrated our
very selves, the very demons that we hate are now within ourselves, most of us chose
not to fight it but there will always be an Antigone who would say NO. The goal of
all revolutionary violence is not to take over state power but to transform it radically,
change its functions and its relationships to its base.
Capitalism gets more name-able every time you tell that it succeeds, we
can get to name in its every new form to exploit us the proletariats, may it be mass
contractualization, Business Processing Outsource, Cheap labour, Child labour,
Human Trafficking. Whatever form may it be, may it be from pre or post-capitalism,
Communism will still be the name of our emancipated future. Communism is a
permanent contradiction and threat to Capitalism. The future lies in our collective
political decision, die if you must stay in the middle because you want to be reassured whose cock is going to win. To side with the oppressors or to side with the
oppressed, the actuality of communism and of our human becoming will only come
to light if we have all finally realized that the lasting true power lies within ourselves,
that the kings clothes are non-existent, that he is actually naked; and not on the
rules and laws that was created by the society to constrict our lives with all these
rules and laws that we are forced to abide to. The bourgeoisie today has the power
simply because we are stripped-bare, giving them too much of our own strengths
and intellects, they are just dumb as shit because they cant think of anything but
themselves and their barbaric booty.
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What about the trouble of the communist paradox? In order for the left to
fully perform the act, they must overcome their melancholic attachment to their
haunted historical past. To accept their past defeat, from their self-flagellations then
see where theyve gone wrong then gain the collective political action to fight again
for conquest of changing the world away from capitalist oppression, the fight for
equality, the un-alienation and emancipation of all men and proper distribution of
wealth. Communism therefore is the act of all round collective self-emancipation by
which a community, civil society, nation or international organization takes hold of
its own destiny.

If not now then when will we take the power back?

(Endnotes)

a
Because Metaphysics are only for the people who cant face the brutalities of life and cant take
revenge on their defeat.

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Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

Neo-liberal na Atake
sa Mundo ng Paggawa
at Panunupil sa Karapatan
ng Manggagawa:
Hamon at Paglaban
Gerry Lanuza
Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

97

98

Keynote Speech, CTUHR, 30th Anniversary,

ika-9 ng Oktubre, 2014, SOLAIR, UP Diliman

Neo-liberal na Atake sa Mundo ng Paggawa

at Panunupil sa Karapatan ng Manggagawa:
Hamon at Paglaban
Gerry Lanuza

Ang mga komunista ay hindi naglilihim ng kanilang mga paniniwala at layunin.

Tahasan nilang ipinapahayag na ang kanilang pakay ay maaari lamang makamit sa
pamamagitan ng marahas na pagwasak sa kasalukuyang lipunan. Hayaan nating
manginig sa sindak ang mga naghaharing uri kapag narinig nila ang paghihimagsik
ng mga komunista. Sa paghihimagsik, walang mawawala sa mga manggagawa kundi
ang kanilang pagkagapos. Dahil para sa kanila ang daigdig. Mga mangagawa sa
ibat ibang panig ng daigdig, magkaisa.
Sinulat ito ni Marx at Engels noong 1848! At ngayon, makaraan ang halos
isang siglo at animnaput anim (166) na taon, marami nang mga nawalan ng
pananampalataya sa sinabi ni Marx at Engels. Ang pamamayagpag ng monopolyo
kapitalismo sa panahon ng globalisasyon, ay tila nagtutulak sa mga manggagawa na
maniwalang wala nang bisa o lipas na ang mga pagsusuri ni Marx at Engels. Sabi pa
ng iba, panis na. Ngunit para sa klasikong Marxismo, payak lamang ang paliwanag:
sa patuloy na pamamayagpag ng kapitalismo sa daigdig, lalong maghihirap ang mga
manggagawa, darami ang bilang ng manggaggawang walang hanap-buhay at sila ang
mangunguna sa pagpapabagsak ng nabubulok na sistema ng kapitalismo. Ngunit sa
kasalukuyan ay maraming mga intelektwal, sa loob at labas ng mga unibersidad, mga
lider manggagawa, mga consultants na bayaran ng mga korporasyon, na naglalatag ng
kakaibang pagsusuri at pagtingin sa patuloy na paghahari ng monopolyo kapitalismo
sa buong daigdig. Ayon sa mga makabagong pagasusuri ng mga tinaguriang
intelektwal, nag-iba na raw ang anyo ng kapitalismo sa daigdig. Lumiliit na raw ang
bilang ng mga manggagawa at napapalitan ng mga tinagurian knowledge workers,
na hindi raw kabilang sa tradisyunal na uring manggagawa. Dahil marami na raw ang
mga knowledge workers at papakaunti na ang mga tunay na manggagawa, nagiiba na rin ang politika at larangan ng pakikibaka. Dahil mas malaki ang sahod at
benepisyo nilang mga tinaguriang knowledge workers sa service sectors, hindi na
raw dapat tignan ang tunggalian ng mga uri bilang pangunahing motor ng panlipunang
pagbabago. Sa kasalukuyan, hindi na sila sumisigaw ng Uring Mangagagawa, Hukbong
Mapagpalaya! Bagkos ang sigaw nila ay: Pagkakapantay-pantay! na walang ibig
sabihin kundi ang pagkakapantay-pantay sa uri, kasarian, lahi, lipi, ng mga bakla,
tomboy, at iba pang kasarian. Tila ang kalaban na ngayon ng mga manggagawa ay
ibat ibang uri ng kaapihan pero nakaligtaan na ang pagsasamantala sa loob ng
kapitalismo. Wala namang masama sa paglaban sa lahat ng kaapihan--kasarian o
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lahi man ito. Heto naman talaga ang layunin ng mga union at samahang manggagawa
sabi ni Lenin.
Ngunit ito ang pagbabalik ng ideyalismo sa ating panahon--Mga intelektwal
na ayaw tawaging manggagawa, relatibong nakakaangat sa mga uring manggagawa
dahil silay nasa loob ng malalamig na opisina. Sila ang mga taga-pagsalita ng
Kapital gamit ang pilosopiyang ideyalismo na ibinaon na ni Marx at Engels
noong kapanahunan panila. Dapat nating balikan at igiit ang materyalismo o ang
siyentipikong pilosopiya na pagpapaliwanag sa kondisyon ng mga manggagawa,
pati na ang mga pagbabagong nagaganap sa lipunan, batay sa materyal at pangekonomiyang kondisyon at pagbabago ng lipunan. Ang materyalistikong pagsusuri
lamang ang maaaring makapagapaliwanag kung bakit ganito na magisip ang ating
mga kaibigan sa Unibersidad, mga theologians, pilosopo, ekonomista, mga middle
class, at mga nakaluklok sa burukrasya ng kapitalistang estado.
Tignan natin ang datos. Sa buong mundo, ang labour force, mga aktibong
nagtatrabaho, ay tinatayang nasa 2,369 million at ito ay halos 50 per cent ng
kabuuang populasyon ng mundo. Kasabay ng paglago ng labor force ay ang paglobo
rin ng income inequality lalo na sa mga underclass na makikita sa mga low-paid
laborers, mga bata, matatanda, kababaihan, at mga racial minorities. Ang pagpasok
ng mga kababaihan sa mga gawaing mababa ang sahod tinatawag na feminization
of the global workforce ang kontraktwalisisasyon, at ang pagdami ng mga racial
minorities sa mga trabahong mababa ang sahod ang siyang maigting na mga isyu sa
pagpasok ng bagong milenyo. Ayon pa sa mga pag-aaral, sa nakalipas na 20 na taon,
ang pagkakahati ng kita ng mga tao sa buong mundo ay nakatulong sa pagyaman ng
mga dati nang mayayayman, habang ang sweldo at kalagayan ng mahihirap at mga
panggitnang uri ay bumubulusok paibaba, kasama na rito ang mayayamang bansa
tulad ng United States, Germany at China. Ayon sa pagaaral ng ILO, Wage-led growth:
An equitable strategy for economic recovery, ito ay hindi lang dahil sa pagbabago
ng teknolohiya. Sa pagtataya ng ILO aabot sa 1.1 billion katao ay maaaring walang
hanap-buhay o kaya ay nakasadlak sa kahirapan. Malapit sa 30 per cent ng lahat ng
mangaggawa sa buong mundo mahigit sa 900 million ay nabubuhay sampu ng
kanilang pamilya sa mas mababa pa sa US$2 in 2011, o 55 million higit pa sa tinataya
bago magkaroon ng krisis. Sa 900 million na mahihirap na mangagawa, mga kalahati
nito ay nabubuhay sa US$1.25 kada araw.

Kung susuriin ang mga datos at istadiskang ito, malalaman natin na ang
mga propeta ng neoliberalismo na nangangaral ng ebanghelyo ayon sa monopolyo
kapitalismo, bilang pinakamataas na yugto ng imperyalismo, ay nagkakalat lamang
ng maling inpormasyon at kaalaman tungkol sa mga manggagawa. Una, hindi
totoong nagbenepisyo ang manggagawa sa kontraktwasisasyon at flexi time. Ang
kontraktwalisasyon ay bahagi lamang ng estratehiya ng neoliberalismo upang
bawasan ang kita at benepisyo ng manggagawa habang pinayayaman nito ang mga
nababangkaroteng korporasyon at mga banko. Ikalawa, hindi totoong yumayaman
na ang mga panggitnang uri at ang mga mangagagwa ay masasaya na dahil sa mga
gadgets at pagtaaas sa sahod. Sa isang survey na ginawa ng Gallup poll, na kinalap
mula sa 140 bansa mula 2010-2011, 63 percent ng mga mangagawa sa buong
daigdig ay hindi masaya sa kanilang hanap buhay o walang pagmamahal sa kanilang
ginagawa -disengagedor simply unmotivated and unlikely to exert extra effort.
Ito ang alienation na tinukoy ni Marx--ang kawalan ang pagpapahalaga ng mga
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manggagawa sa kanilang ginagawa. Ito ay dahil sa pagbabaklas ng ugnayan ng mga

manggagawa sa kanilang kapangyarihang lumikha at ang pagtamasa sa produkto ng
kanilang paggawa.
Ang economic terrorism at pananabotahe sa mga unyon ay isa lang anyo
ng pagdurog ng neoliberaismo sa patuloy na pag-aaklas ng mga manggagawa. Ang
pagbaba ng bilang ng mga welga ng mga manggagawa ay hudyat ng pagkalusaw ng
mga unyon. Sa nakalipas na 12 na taon, 26.7 percent ng mga manggagawa ay kasapi
sa mga unyon. Sa panahon ni Pres. Aquino bumaba ang bilang nga organisadong
unyon. At sa kasalukuyan ito ay nasa 8 percent na lamang, at 12 percent lamang ng
mga manggagawang nasa unyon ang may collective bargaining agreements (CBAs).
Habang ang neoliberalismo ay patuloy sa pagpapasok ng kapital at pagtaguyod
ng malayang merkado sa pamamagitan ng deregulisasyon, pribatisasyon, sa kumpas
ng IMF-WB, WTO, APEC, at ang Transpacific Partnership, kung saan binabaklas ang
mga serbisyong pangpubliko sa kalusugan at edukasyon, lalong naghihikahos ang
mga manggagawa. Ang net worth naman ng 40 pinakamayamang Filipino ay lumobo
ng apat na beses mula $16.4 B noong 2009 sa $64.4 B nitong 2013. Sabi pa ng Ibon
ang pinagsamang yaman ng 40 pinakamayamang Filipino noong 2012 na umaabot
sa $47.4 B ay 21 percent na ng GDP ng Pilipinas sa 2013.
Ang Simbahan at ang Uring Manggagawa

Sa gitna ng kahirapang dinaranas ng mga manggagawa sa buong daigdig,
kamangha-mangha na ang simbahang Katoliko mismo sa pangunguna ni Pope Francis
ay sumigaw: No to economy of exclusion. Sabi ng Santo Papa sa kanyang Evangelii
Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel): Today everything comes under the laws of competition
and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a
consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized:
without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. Ibinasura niya
ang propaganda ng mga nagsusulong ng neoliberalismo sa trickle-down effect: In
this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume
that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in
bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. Ang epekto nito ayon
sa kanya ay kultura ng walang pakialaman: The culture of prosperity deadens us;
we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime
all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to
move us. Ang neoliberalismo ay gumawa ng isang relihiyong sumasamba sa pera at
merkadong walang pakialam sa kahirapan: We have created new idols. The worship
of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex32:1 -35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in
the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly
human purpose. Pinagsabihan niya ang mga bankero at mananalapi: Not to share
ones wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It
is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs. At tila ba na parang isang sosyalista,
sabi ng Santo Papa: As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved
by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by
attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the worlds
problems... Inequality is the root of social ills.

Hindi tayo dapat mamangha sa mga matatalim at maaanghang na pahayag na
ito ng Simbahan dahil ang simbahan mismo ay napakahaba ng kanyang kasaysayan
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sa pagtatanggol sa mga manggagawa mula pa sa Bibliya hanggang sa social encyclical

na Rerum Novarum ni Pope Leo XIII. Tandaan natin na ang unang mga Kristyano
ay mga rebolusyonaryo. Ang mga sinaunang Kristyano ay mga galing sa uring api,
alipin, mga proletaryo, at mga maralitang lungsod. Silay pinaratangan na mga
atheists dahil hindi sila sumamba sa Imperyalismo ng mga Romano. Tandaan din
na ang tagapagtatag ng Kristyanismo na si Hesus ay kabilang sa pamilya ng uring
manggagawa, at ang ama nya ay uring manggagawa. Si Hesus ay pumanig at namuhay
kasama ang mga mangingisda, magsasaka, maghahayop, mangangaso at iba pang
aping uri.

Mas malalim pa rito ang ugnayan ng rebolusyonaryong simbahan at
manggagawa. Dahil ang Diyos ng Kristyanismo ay mangagagawa. Ang paglikha sa
daigdig ay isang uri ng paggawa. Ang Diyos mismo ay manggagawa. Kaya nga ito ang
batayan ng dignity of labor! Sa tuwing tayoy gumagawa, nagiging katuwang natin
ang Diyos sa paggawa at paglikha. Kaya mas mahalaga ang paggawa kaysa kapital.
Tayo ay ka-manggagawa ng Diyos!

Sa aral at turo ng simbahan, No one may deny the right to organize without
attacking human dignity itself. Therefore, we firmly oppose organized efforts, such
as those regrettably now seen in this country, to break existing unions and prevent
workers from organizing. (Economic Justice for All, Catholic Bishops, No. 104).
Kayat mahalaga na pagtibayin natin ang pagkakaisa, pag-oorganisa sa
hanay ng mga manggagawa. Sa sama-samang pagkilos, pag-organisa, pag-aaral, at
pakikibaka lamang maisusulong ang mga lehitimong karapatan ng mga manggagawa.
Dapat nating labanan ang mga mapanghating pananaw na pinagbubukod-bukod
ang mga aping sektor ng ating lipunan at pinagsasamantalahang uri. Kailangan
nating makita na sa pagsasama-sama lamang, sa pagtingin lamang sa mga kaapihan
bilang bahagi ng kapitalistang pagsasamantala, natin makikita ang pangangailangan
ng universal emancipation. Dapat na mawasak natin ang paghiwa-hiwalay ng mga
grupong pilit itinatangi at inihihiwalay ang kanilang opresyon laban sa iba pang
aping uri. Ang union at samahan ng mga manggagawa ay hindi lamang taga-pagtala
ng mga tinig ng mga aping uri. Sila ay mga tanggulan ng mga inaapi. Hindi kalianman
mawawakasan ang pang aapi hanggat hindi napapalaya ang buong sangkatauhan. At
hindi mapapalaya ang sangkatauhan kung hindi mapapalaya ang mga manggagawa.
At hindi mapapalaya ng mga manggagawa ang kanilang uri nang hindi napapalaya
ang iba pang uri laban sa pagsasamantala. Huwag tayong palinlang sa mga propetang
nangangaral na ang neoliberalismo ay walang hanggan at walang katapusan. Ang mga
uring manggagawa ang magwawakas sa monopolyo kapitalismo dahil sila lamang
ang may istorikong misyon na lagutin ang tanikala ng pangaabuso ng lahat ng uri!

At ito ay nakatala sa Mission and Vision ng CTUHR, na ngayon ay nagdiriwang
ng ika-30 ng aanibersaryo:
CTUHRs purpose is to confront state and capitalists human rights violations not
with an equally evil force but with an awareness that strength and emancipation
lies in the hands of the workers themselves and in solidarity with the poor and the
oppressed.
Maraming salamat at mabuhay ang mga uring manggagawa!

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Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory

and Anti-Imperialist Education

Literary Folio

Analekta at iba pang mga Tula

ni E. San Juan, Jr.

Pingkian 4, No. 1 (2017)

105

LAMBAT NG BAHAG-HARI:
Katumbalikan sa Teorya & Praktika
A. PAIN
Anak na di paluhain, inat asawa ang patatangisin--

Walang ligaya sa lupa na di dinilig ng balde-baldeng luha-Dagat binubuo ng patak ng tubig, bundok ng butot bungong maliliit-Maliit man daw ang sili may anghang na angking sarili--

Malaki man at buhanghang, daig ang munting aring siksikan-Munti mat matindi, daig ang nagmamalaki--

Mababaw man ang sugat, malalim ang ugat ng gurlis at pilat-Sugat na inilihim at tinakpan, gumaling may balantukan--

Kung minsan ang awa ay nagiging iwa, pasaling may humihiwa-Nasa tuldik ang awa, nasa lumagda ang gawa, siya nawa--

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B. LANSI
Hindi lahat ng batid o wani kailangang ipagsulit---

Walang humawak ng kalan o nanghimasok sa luto na di naulingan.

Bawat palayok daw ay may kasukat na suklob, isinukat na tungtong.
Sumala ang sandok sa palayok, gusing lihim ang nadukot.

Sala sa lamig, sala sa init, sa pagmumura nagkasalay nahuhuli--

Walang masamang kanya, walang mabuti sa iba, pag-aayaw-ayawin pa ba?

Malabis na pag-asa, laging pangangarap, dalamhati ang ibubunga.
Batong-buhay ka man na sakdal tigas, unti-unting patak ng dura

tuloy maaagnas--

Biyayang apoy at habagat, batuta man ay pinalalambot.

Humahabol ay nahuli sa unang humarurot sa pagsisisi.

Walang unang sisi sa huling pangyayari, mayroon sa unang pagkawili.

Bakit ka pa magsisisi, gayong napariwarat di na makangisi.
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C. SILO

Kung mayroong itinanim, tila hindi tiyak na may aanihin--

Kapag may isinuksok sa dingding, kailangan pa bang tingalain?

Kung hangin ang itinanim, baka tsunami ang aanihin--

Hanging pabula-bulangit, sandaling sakdal tuwid, kadalasay pilipit-Nagkamali ang hilot sa isinuksok, ay naku! sa puwit nadukot--

Ang sukli ng isang nasa kamao, higit sa ipinangakong dalawa o tatlo-Iba na ang isang hawak sa palad kaysa sandamakmak na lumilipad-Walang mailap na baboy-ramo sa matiyagang patay-gutom--

Iba ang pugong huli na kumpara sa sungayang dadakpin pa-Walang umani ng tuwa na di sa hinagpis naipunla--

Kung hiwaga ang itinanim, baka himalat masungit na aswang ang anihin--

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D. DAYA
Kapag iniamba dapat na itaga, kapag itinaga, maipatataga-Ang anumang gawin, makapito mong isipin kung di ka pa nabigti-Kung magagawa at di gawin, di na magagawa kahiman ibigin--

Tikatik man kung panay ang ulan, nakapinid na pilik-matay mapapaapaw-Anumang gawang dinali-dali, malimit mangyariy di mayayarit tuloy lugi-Hanap lamang ay hamog, putragis, buong katawan sa tubig naanodKung di makipagsapalaran, di makatatawid sa magkaibayong karagatan-Kaya maligo ka sa linaw, kahit duling o bulag, sa labo magbanlaw-Kung ang hirap ay masasal na, bisperas na kaya ng ginhawa?

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HIWAGA
Akoy may tapat na irog saanman parooy kasunod-sunod;
Mapatubig ay di nalulunod, mapaapoy ay di nasusunog.
Mayroon akong alipin, sunod nang sunod sa akin.
Kung araw, yumao ka; kung gabiy halika;

Sa araw ay nagtataboy, sa gabi ay nag-aampon.

Laging nakasakay ngunit di nagpapasyal.

Lumalakad ang bangka, ang piloto ay nakahiga.

Hindi hayop, hindi tao, walang gulong ay tumatakbo.
Takbo roon, takbo rito, hindi makaalis sa tayong ito.
Nang maalalay naiwan, nadala nang malimutan.
Pasurot-surot, dala-dala ay gapos.

Dalawang magkaibigan, unahan nang unahan.

Dalawang batong itim, malayo ang nararating.

Maputing parang bulak, kalihim ko sa pagliyag.

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HULA
Nakatalikod na ang prinsesa, mukha niyay nakaharap pa.
Mukha koy totoong tinikin, ngunit busilak ang kalooban.
Aling mabuting litrato, kuhang-kuha sa mukha mo.

Isang panyong parisukat, kung buksay nakakausap.

Hindi pa natatalupan, nanganganinag na ang laman.
Binuksan ang kanyon, perdigones ang nakabaon.
Dalawang bolang sinulid, abot hanggang langit.

Kung manahiy nagbabaging, dumudumi ng sinulid.

Binili ko nang mahal, isinabit ko lamang.
Mataas ay binitin, kaysa pinagbitinan.
Pusong bibitin-bitin, masarap kainin.

Kinain mot naubos, nabubuo pang lubos.

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IMPRESYON SA ISANG DIKTADOR

Huwag, huwag mong sabihin na siyay tunggak loko tanga-Marunong iyon sa pandarayat panggagahis.
Huwag mong sabihing gago o hangal--

Sa katusuhan wala siyang pangalawa....

Huwag, huwag mong sabihing ulol o baliw siya-Siyay tuso sa pangakot pambobola....

Totoong alam natin ito, hindi maiisahan, sanay na tayo.

Ilang bilanggot nasawi ang testigo dito.
Huwag mong sabihing di natin alam

Ang mga taktika ng mangungulimbat

At estratehiya ng mga galamay ng Estado-

Magkasundo tayo ng diktador sa kabatiran

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Na sa larangan ng politika tayo naglalaban-Di lang sa diwa o isip, madugong tagisan

Ng mga katawan--tortyur, dukot, sapilitang pagkawala-Pagwasak ng katawan ay politika,

Ang kaligtasan ng laman ay politika,

Ang bangkay ay politikang natalo,

Ang buhay ng mga anak ay politikang nagtagumpay.

Kaya magkasabwat tayo ng diktador,

Kapwa tayo alagad ng walang patawad na Realpolitik-Ang madugong transpormasyon ng diwat kilos,

Katawat kaluluwa, pakikipagkapwat pangungulila.

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DEMONSTRASYON
PARA KAY KASAMANG STALIN
[Halaw mula kay Langston Hughes]

Tinaguriang Kasamang Bakal, malambot ang iyong dibdib,

Nasugatan ng paghihikahos ng uring manggagawat magsasaka

Sa bilangguan ng Tsar, nagpupugay kami,
Mga taga-Ben Tre, Biyetnam
Hanap moy kalayaan, Kasamang Stalin,

Di para sa iyo kundi para sa masa ng sansinukob

Kaya humawak ng baril, bumabati kami,
Mga taga-Lidice, Czechoslovakia.

Mula Antartica hanggang Zanzibar

Inilarawan kang berdugo sa propaganda ng imperyalismo ngunit

Sa puso naming taga-Guernica, Espanya,
Ikaw ang pulang tala ng pagbabangon.

Magiting na Komunista, Kasamang Stalin,

Kaming taga-Sowetot Karameh ay nagpapasalamat sa iyong halimbawa

Kung may pagkakamali ka man, iyoy napunan na
Sa tagumpay ng digmaan laban sa pasismo.

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Kaming mga taga-Joloy sumusumpang ibuburol ang imperyalismong Kanot

Mga kakutsaba sa harap mo, dakilang Stalin,

Saanmang lupalop kung saan ang masot karit ay di lamang sagisag

Kundi kagamitang mabisa sa pang-araw-araw na gawain.

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TAHIMIK
Payapang lugar walang tilii bulahaw hiyaw kulog dagundong
Tahimik
Walang tinig taghoy halinghing sigaw saklolo tahol tugtog palakpak iyak
Walang bigkas atungal palahaw tanguyngoy usap ngalngal tagulaylay
Walang ingay ungol haginghing himutok irit hibik hagulgol angil
Payapa
Walang hikbi daldal haluyhoy lagaslas alingawngaw saklolo
Walang huni sipol pagaspas lawiswis halakhak agas-as
Walang siyap sutsot bulong alatiit kuliling kaluskos paswit
Tahimik

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Piping lahat--negunit bakit may kumakatok humihingi ng saklolo

ugong sa sulok

anasan sa butas

ng bungo ...psssssst---

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